Geography

knowledge begins with the basics

Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction

to the study of the role that humankind plays in shaping
the world around us. Whether it’s environmental
concerns, the cities we live in or the globalization of

Human Geography
the economy, these are issues which affect us all. This
book introduces these topics and more including:

Andrew Jones
• global environment issues and development
• cities, firms and regions
• migration, immigration and asylum
• landscape, culture and identity
• travel, mobility and tourism Human
• agriculture and food.
Featuring an overview of theory, end of chapter
summaries, case study boxes, further reading lists
Geography
and a glossary, this book is the ideal introduction for
anybody new to the study of human geography.
Professor Andrew Jones is Head of the School of
Geography, Environment and Development Studies at
Birkbeck, University of London. Previous publications
include Dictionary of Globalization and Globalization:
Key Thinkers.
Andrew
Jones

Cover image: © Shutterstock

cover design: Keenan

ISBN 978-0-415-57552-2

www.routledgestudents.com
9 780415 575522
 H U M A N GE O G R A P H Y

THE BASICS

Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction to the study

of the role that humankind plays in shaping the world around us.
Whether it’s environmental concerns, the cities we live in or the
globalization of the economy, these are issues that affect us all. This
book introduces these topics and more including:

 global environment issues and development

 cities, firms and regions
 migration, immigration and asylum
 landscape, culture and identity
 travel, mobility and tourism
 agriculture and food.

Featuring an overview of theory, end of chapter summaries, case

study boxes, further reading lists and a glossary, this book is the ideal
introduction for anybody new to the study of human geography.

Professor Andrew Jones is Head of the School of Geography,

Environment and Development Studies at Birkbeck, University of
London. Previous publications include Dictionary of Globalization
and Globalization: Key Thinkers.
The Basics
ACTING HUMAN GENETICS
BELLA MERLIN RICKI LEWIS

ANTHROPOLOGY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

PETER METCALF PETER SUTCH AND JUANITA ELIAS

ARCHAEOLOGY (SECOND EDITION) ISLAM (SECOND EDITION)

CLIVE GAMBLE COLIN TURNER

ART HISTORY JUDAISM

GRANT POOKE AND DIANA NEWALL JACOB NEUSNER

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LANGUAGE (SECOND EDITION)

KEVIN WARWICK R.L. TRASK

THE BIBLE LAW

JOHN BARTON GARY SLAPPER AND DAVID KELLY

BUDDHISM LITERARY THEORY (SECOND EDITION)

CATHY CANTWELL HANS BERTENS

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE LOGIC

SUMAN GUPTA JC BEALL

CRIMINAL LAW MANAGEMENT

JONATHAN HERRING MORGEN WITZEL

CRIMINOLOGY (SECOND EDITION) MARKETING (SECOND EDITION)

SANDRA WALKLATE KARL MOORE AND NIKETH PAREEK

DANCE STUDIES MEDIA STUDIES

JO BUTTERWORTH JULIAN MCDOUGALL

ECONOMICS (SECOND EDITION) OLYMPIC GAMES

TONY CLEAVER ANDY MIAH & BEATRIZ GARCIA

EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY (FOURTH EDITION)

KAY WOOD NIGEL WARBURTON

EVOLUTION PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

SHERRIE LYONS JOSEPH HOLDEN

EUROPEAN UNION (SECOND EDITION) POETRY (SECOND EDITION)

ALEX WARLEIGH-LACK JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT

FILM STUDIES POLITICS (FOURTH EDITION)

AMY VILLAREJO STEPHEN TANSEY AND NIGEL JACKSON

FINANCE (SECOND EDITION) THE QUR’AN

ERIK BANKS MASSIMO CAMPANINI
RACE AND ETHNICITY SOCIOLOGY
PETER KIVISTO AND PAUL R. CROLL KEN PLUMMER

RELIGION (SECOND EDITION) SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

MALORY NYE JANICE WEARMOUTH

RELIGION AND SCIENCE TELEVISION STUDIES

PHILIP CLAYTON TOBY MILLER

RESEARCH METHODS TERRORISM

NICHOLAS WALLIMAN JAMES LUTZ AND
BRENDA LUTZ
ROMAN CATHOLICISM
MICHAEL WALSH THEATRE STUDIES
ROBERT LEACH
SEMIOTICS (SECOND EDITION)
DANIEL CHANDLER WORLD HISTORY
PETER N. STEARNS
SHAKESPEARE (THIRD EDITION)
SEAN MCEVOY
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
T H E BA S I C S

andrew jones
First published 2012
by Routledge
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© 2012 Andrew Jones
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jones, Andrew, 1973-
Human geography: the basics / Andrew Jones.
p. cm. – (The basics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Human geography. I. Title.
GF41.J65 2012
304.2 – dc23
2011047582

ISBN: 978-0-415-57551-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-57552-2 (pbk)
(ebk)
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Typeset in Bembo and Scala Sans

by Taylor & Francis Books
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viii

1. Introduction 1
2. Globalization 22
3. Development and Environment 48
4. States, Nations and Culture 62
5. Cities, Regions and Industries 91
6. People, Work, and Mobility 127
7. Bodies, Practices and Identities 160
8. Concluding Overview: Human Geography Today 178

Glossary 183
References 192
Index 199
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TABLES
1.1 Human geography and its sub-disciplines 7
1.2 Theoretical foundations to human geography 13

FIGURES
5.1 Burgess’s concentric zone model of urban land use 117
5.2 The size and spatial distribution of central places and
their hinterlands (after Christaller) 119
6.1 The demographic transition model 133
6.2 Population pyramids of a developed and a developing
country 134
 INTRODUCTION
 1

WHAT IS HUMAN GEOGRAPHY?

The academic subject of geography has had a mixture of fortunes
throughout its history. The ancient Greeks saw geographical
knowledge as one of the leading forms of scholarship, and the birth
of modern geography placed it at the forefront of expanding
Western empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, geo-
graphers were also at the forefront of ideas in a darker phase of
history in the 20th century and caught up in ideologies leading to
the First and Second World Wars. In the latter part of the 20th
century, the subject also lost status. After the Second World War,
some questioned the coherence of a subject that spanned the natural
science of physical geography and the social science of human
geography. Harvard University actually closed its geography depart-
ment in 1948, more or less for just this reason. Moreover, in the
English-speaking world, the later 20th century saw geography lam-
pooned in popular culture as backward-looking, all about the names
of capital cities, rivers and drawing maps. By the 1970s, comedians on
television and film gained laughs from stereotypes of ‘geography tea-
chers’, perhaps based on caricatures of teachers boring students with
facts about far-flung places. In British culture, BBC comedies such
as The Goodies and later Blackadder (now endlessly repeated on cable
2 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

channels worldwide) portrayed geography teachers as objects of

ridicule. In North America, portrayals have tended more often to
be of a dull subject that just wasn’t cool.
However, in the 21st century, geography as a whole, and human
geography as a part of that, has enjoyed a far-reaching rejuvenation.
In the last 30 years, the subject has enjoyed renewed interest and
popularity, and influential people beyond the academic world have
once again started to echo the 17th century philosopher John Locke
(1632–1704) in proclaiming geography to be one of the most useful
and important of subjects. Rather than being perceived as a
weakness, being both a natural and social science is once again
increasingly seen as a strength. There are several reasons for this
renewal. In part it is to do with a significant evolution of what
human geographers study and how they now go about theorizing
the social world. It is also to do with how the world has changed,
most notably as we live in a world that in the early 21st century in
one way or another is increasingly globalized. At the time of writ-
ing this book, the current president of the Royal Geographical
Society in London is in fact the former Monty Python comedian,
now famed global traveller, Michael Palin. It is perhaps symbolic of
the reversal in the subject’s fortunes that such a high-profile figure
should invest energy in championing the subject of geography.
Undoubtedly, this reversal in geography’s fortunes reflects a wider
recognition that many of the current and ‘big’ challenges that face
the world today are well addressed by the subject: globalization,
climate change, sustainability, economic development or poverty
reduction. Yet it is also about a reinvigoration of the theoretical
ideas in the half of the discipline that this book deals with: human
geography.
In that respect – dealing with half rather than a whole subject –
this book is unique in The Basics series. To understand geography in
its entirety, you may well want to invest in the companion volume
Physical Geography: The Basics. But human and physical geography
are also inextricably linked through geography’s long interest in the
relation between the social and natural worlds and the ways that
many issues – most notably that of our environment – require
knowledge and understanding of both.
So what is human geography, and what is all about? Human
geography is concerned with all aspects of human society on Earth,
 INTRODUCTION 3

but in particular adopts a spatial approach. If any one distinguishing fea-

ture marks the subject out from other social science subjects, it is this
concern to think spatially about the social world. In that respect,
human geographers share an interest in an enormous range of topics
that are also the concern of other social science disciplines. What
makes their perspective different, however, is what many thinkers
in the subject call a ‘geographical imagination’. Human geographers
think about how things exists in space, how features of the social
world change across spaces and the difference that places make to
the nature of human existence. They are also concerned with the
unevenness of human existence in space and between different places.
This rests on a basic philosophical viewpoint that everything that
happens in human life occurs in a certain space and time. Geographers
often use the clever epithet that all social life, one way or another,
‘takes place’. That is, everything in human life has to happen some-
where, and that somewhere (along with its relations to a lot of somewhere
elses) matters a lot in terms of what actually happens.
Human geography is therefore all about understanding why the
spatial nature of ‘social things’ matter. Differences between places
shape how the nature of how things develop. Economic geo-
graphers, for example, have long argued that certain industries
develop in certain cities or regions for reasons related to the specific
nature of those places as well as to their position in relation to other
places. In previous centuries, iron and steel industries grew up in
Western Europe in places that were close to natural deposits of iron
ore and in proximity to fuels for smelting like coal. By the 20th
century, being close to these raw materials was no longer important
but industries persisted in those places because by then a suitably
skilled workforce were living in them and other related activities
like shipbuilding had started near by. Examples would be north-east
England in the UK, or the northern coast of Germany around the
Rhine. In the 21st century, however, cheap labour and the demand
for steel in developing countries in Asia and elsewhere have increas-
ingly led to the relocation of these industries to new regions of the
world such as the southern provinces of China and South Korea.
Likewise, political geographers see the development of certain
governments and political institutions in a country as inseparable
from the past development of societies in those particular parts of
the world. Bolivian politics is very different from Thai politics for a
4 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

whole myriad of reasons related to the very different locations of

these nation-states on the planet’s surface, and to the long history and
relationships with other places these societies have had. In today’s
world, where there has been much debate about the globalization of
human life on Earth, the patterns of relationships across spaces and
places that human geographers have sought to analyse have become
increasingly complicated. Equally cultural geographers have long
associated the nature of different cultures with – in one way or
another – people living in certain places and in certain ways over
long periods of time, although in modern times globalization has
made this much more complex and difficult.
So human geography then is a very broad subject in terms of topics
of analysis but one characterized by a very distinctive emphasis on the
nature and significance of space and location. In writing this book
I want to try to convince you that it is one of the most useful
subjects anyone can study, and that it offers a unique and very
powerful approach for understanding the big issues that face
everyone on planet Earth in the 21st century. Not to play down
the specific strengths of other subjects, human geographers certainly
see the world differently from, say, sociologists, economists or
political scientists. The philosophical concern with space provides
an overall concern with issues that are often dealt with separately in
other subjects. This holistic approach to understanding the social
world is often seen as a major distinguishing strength. The reason is
fairly straightforward: the social world is a complicated and messy
thing that requires an understanding of many different aspects in order
to see the whole. And you can only get so far in theorizing the
world by focusing on one aspect in isolation to the exclusion of others.
Economists may focus on markets, political scientists on institutions
or sociologists on practices, but human geographers try to look at the
relationships between all of these in order to understand what happens
in the world. Human geography today is therefore a diverse subject far
from the caricatures of geography teachers from earlier decades boring
students with factual lists of peoples, places and countries. Hopefully
if you are reading this book, your experience of geography in
general, and human geography more particularly, is rather different
from these caricatures. They exist because it is true that 40 or 50 years
ago, the subject of geography was taught rather differently in
English-speaking countries, but it is also true that the subject has
 INTRODUCTION 5

itself changed quite radically. Before we consider how this has

come about, and the sheer diversity of both topics and theoretical
ideas in human geography today, it is important to understand the
major goals of this book and how it is organized.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

This book attempts to provide a whistle-stop tour of human geography
to give you a broad overview of the subject. It has deliberately not
been organized around a list of what are often called sub-disciplines
within the subject. Not only would such an approach be tedious,
but covering every possible topic in human geography would be
impossible. Other books, such as the Dictionary of Human Geography
or the online International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, fulfil
such a role, and do a good job. Rather the goal of this book is to
give the reader an overview that shows how the many different
topics and themes in human geography today relate to each other.
With that in mind, the book is organized into six further thematic
chapters that try to illustrate the linkages between different but
often overlapping sub-disciplines in the subject. In that way, it should
give you an understanding of how both economic and political geo-
graphers are interested in governments and regulations, or how many
questions of environmental change concern not only environmental
geographers but also cultural or development geographers.
This thematic tour of the subject begins in the next chapter by
considering how human geography has been concerned with the big
questions around globalization. This debate in human geography is
very closely related to the themes considered in Chapter 3: the ques-
tion of development and debates about the global environment.
Chapter 4 then moves to look at how human geographers have
conceptualized the states and nationalism, culture and landscape. In
Chapter 5, the themes focus on issues that have been of central
interest to urban and economic geographers in considering the large
body of work within the subject concerned with cities, regions and
industries. Chapter 6 then examines themes of a more social and poli-
tical nature in considering geographical work on population and
demography, migration, mobility and labour. This is followed by an
overview in Chapter 7 of how social and cultural geographies have
sought to theorize the nature of the body and identities based
6 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

around gender, ethnicity, race and age. Finally, the book ends
with a brief concluding chapter that outlines some of the future
directions human geography is likely to develop along as a subject.
However, this thematic approach to providing an overview of
human geography still does not avoid the necessity of discussing
different sub-disciplines altogether. While the thematic chapters do
cut across different areas of the subject, these sub-disciplines have
distinctive topics of interest and have often developed around particular
theoretical and methodological approaches. The major sub-disciplines
and the kinds of topics geographers working in them are interested in
are shown in Table 1.1. As you will see, human geography is perhaps
more interdisciplinary in its nature than other social science subjects,
but it is important to realize it is not a chaotic or incoherent diversity.
Before we move on to the thematic chapters, it is therefore relevant
to consider in more depth the historical evolution of the subject which
led to the emergence of these distinct sub-disciplinary areas and also
examine the cross-cutting theoretical ideas that are often brought
together when human geographers seek to understand the world
today. The remainder of this chapter considers each of these issues
in turn.

A (VERY) SHORT HISTORY OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

While geography as an academic discipline has a very long history
dating back to the Greek civilization, the subject we know today
emerged during the 18th and particularly 19th centuries as the study of
the Earth’s physical and human features and how those varied between
countries and regions. The development of what is now human geo-
graphy is in particular bound up in the period when Western
European countries were expanding their influence across the globe
through the development of first colonies and later empires.
Geography as a subject was seen as central to understanding the
nature of the world. The first society was founded in 1821 in
Paris – the Société Géographique de Paris (SGP), with other national
geographical societies such as the Royal Geographical Society (founded
in London in 1830) following in European countries soon after.
Over the century thereafter, the establishment of geography spread
worldwide with, for example, the American National Geographic
Society being founded in 1888 and the Association of Japanese
Table 1.1 Human geography and its sub-disciplines
Sub-discipline in Examples of topics or Example journal/s where work in
human geography debates this area can be found*
Economic Regional economies Economic Geography
Industrial Journal of Economic Geography
Development Regional Studies
Clusters Environment & Planning A
Firms
Social/cultural Landscape Journal of Cultural Geography
Consumption Environment & Planning D:
Identity Society and Space
Political International System Political Geography
Nationalism/ Antipode
geopolitics
Historical Past landscapes Journal of Historical Geography
History of Cities
Urban Global urban system Urban Studies
Urban development International Journal of Urban and
Global cities Regional Research
Development Poverty alleviation Journal of Development Studies
Postcolonial Journal of Latin American Studies
Government
Post-development
Environmental Sustainable Global Environmental Change
development Annals of the Association of
Human impacts of American Geographers*
climate change Transactions of the IBG*
Food security
Population Demographic Annals of the Association of
transition American Geographers
Migration
Feminist/queer The body Journal of Cultural Geography
Gender, Place and Culture
Rural Agricultural change Rural Geography
Rural livelihoods
Transport Mobility Journal of Transport Geography
Mobilities
Children Youth identity/ Children’s Geographies
exclusion
* These are just examples, and many journals in human geography span these
fields, with some dealing explicitly with a number of areas, such as Transactions
of the IBG, Annals of AAG, Progress in Human Geography.
8 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Geographers in 1925. During the 20th century, the legacy of

Western European imperialism led to the further spread of geography
as a discipline studied and taught in universities across the globe.
Prior to the 20th century, much of what would be described
as human geography took a regional emphasis. Human geography
in the 19th century was mostly concerned with examining, mapping
and describing the distinctive nature of different societies and cultures
of people living in different regions of the globe. It has also been
criticized for this direct link to the imperial ambitions of Western
European countries. Human geography undoubtedly played its part
in acting to support colonialism and the domination of peoples
around the world by Western European societies. Geographical
knowledge has always been used by political rulers, military leaders
and others, sometimes to ill effect. However, in the 20th century,
the problematic status of the subject in relation to the politics of the
real world is even clearer. Human geography developed beyond a
simple descriptive emphasis providing information about different
parts of the world, and began to develop theories of how human
societies related to each other in space and territory. Chapter 4 of
this book considers, for example, how human geographical theories
in the early 20th century were caught up in the world wars. The
ideas of the British geographer Halford MacKinder (1861–1947)
concerning the competition and conflict for territory between the
19th-century European nations certainly informed political ideolo-
gies that led to the First World War. Equally, the work of two
German human geographers, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) and
Walter Christaller (1893–1969), were made use of by the Nazis in
Germany to both justify German territorial expansion and aid the
planning of new settlement in countries that had been invaded,
such as Poland. It is always hard to judge the past and the intentions
of individuals, and these human geographers were not necessarily
directly or intentionally involved in the fateful political projects
that led to the world wars, but their ideas certainly played a part
(Barnes 2011).
Perhaps for this reason the human geography that emerged in the
1950s in Europe and North America moved away from theoretical
models and returned to a very regional and descriptive approach.
The experience of human geographical theories applied to the real
world in the first half of the century had not been a positive one.
 INTRODUCTION 9

However, by the 1960s, human geographers increasingly rejected

this regional and descriptive approach, once again seeking to develop
a theoretical human geography. Their inspiration was a philosophical
school of thought in the social sciences known as positivism, which
in essence argued that social theories should be developed in the
same way as natural science subject such as physics, chemistry and
biology. Human geography then took on the methodologies of
these subjects, trying to become a spatial science. This involved the
development and testing of scientific hypotheses, the aim being to
establish factual geographical knowledge about the social world and
the way it works through the collection of data. During this period
human geographers made increasing use of quantitative methods
and statistical analysis, seen to be more rigorous and scientific than past
descriptive approaches to the subject.
Yet by the mid-1970s a further wave of criticism within human
geography doubted the capacity of this so-called ‘quantitative
revolution’ to deliver the truth of the social world. In particular,
two critical strands to human geography developed. One came in
the form of Marxist human geography that argued (drawing on
wider Marxism) that attempting to turn human geography into
some kind of pure ‘spatial science’ which could construct objective
and neutral facts about the social world was fundamentally misguided.
Informed by Marxist political economy, which was concerned
with social justice, inequality and the uneven power between groups
in society, a new wave of human geography rejected the ideas of
positivism and sought to develop a human geography that was engaged
with political questions. Geographers such as David Harvey and Edward
Soja used Marxist theories to offer new insights into why the world
economy produced inequalities of wealth in different places. They
were in essence interested in the way capitalism led to uneven eco-
nomic development. Much of this analysis developed a geographical
perspective on Marxist theories of capitalism as an economic system
that had emerged in Western Europe from the 16th century onwards
and spread progressively across the globe through Western European
colonialism and subsequent empire-building. Geographers began to
argue that this capitalist system – based on money and market
relations as the main organizers of economic activity – existed differ-
ently and with different effects across and between different places.
During the 1980s, Marxist and political economic approaches to
10 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

human geography became widely adopted as geographers looked

at, for example, labour relations in different regions and countries,
or how the international production of manufactured goods relies on
cheap (and arguably exploited) labour in less developed countries.
The other critical strand was what is known as humanistic geography.
This developed from an interest in the philosophical ideas of
humanism and was critical of the way in which positivism treated
human beings as numbers or elements of numerical models. Humanistic
geographers argued that the quantitative revolution had ‘dehumanized’
human geography, and that it no longer paid attention to the context of
people in places. Humanistic geography therefore tried to incorporate
a consideration of the physical, social and emotional surroundings
of people, and moved away from thinking about space as an
abstract in the way that the quantitative models of the 1960s had done.
This critical line in human geography also saw the use of different
qualitative methodologies to research the social world which
geographers drew from other social science disciplines including
psychology, anthropology and sociology.
However, the rise of these critical approaches to human geography
soon faced a new challenge. During the later 1980s, human geography
underwent a series of further transformations. This is widely
described in general terms as the so-called ‘cultural turn’ within
the subject, and was a result of the impact of postmodern and
poststructuralist philosophies and ideas from outside the discipline.
Broadly speaking, during the 1980s, in many social science subjects
the idea that social science could produce ‘big’ generalized theories
of the world that explained every aspect of human life came under
attack. Postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers argued in various
ways that the goal of developing ‘big’ universal theories of the social
world was a mistake and impossible to achieve. In essence, this was for
two reasons. First, that knowledge is always a partial and limited
thing. You can never fully know everything about something. All
knowledge – even scientific knowledge – is a limited representation of
reality. This is the case (to differing extents) whether you are deal-
ing with a physicist’s theory of subatomic particles, or the kind of
social scientific theories found in human geography. The second
issue is about the politicized nature of knowledge. Postmodern thinkers
argue that there is no objective truth to be found out about the world.
It is not only too complex, but the creation of ‘truly objective’
 INTRODUCTION 11

knowledge is impossible. All knowledge is created by people

through a process of negotiation and discussion, and in that sense it
is in part always a socially constructed thing rather than something
that exists independently. That doesn’t mean you can’t find out
some kind of truth about the world, but it will only ever be part of
the story.
There is much more that could be said about postmodern and
poststructuralist thinking and it is advisable to read around this issue
further (see Further Reading at the end of this chapter). The impor-
tant thing for our purposes here is to emphasize the substantial impact
of a broad group of ideas on human geography in recent decades.
Broadly speaking, three effects on the subject are important to
highlight. The first is the questioning that postmodern ideas brought
to ‘big’ theories in human geography, whether of the positivist gen-
eralizations made by those in the quantitative tradition or the
ambitious theories made by political economists and Marxist geo-
graphers. Human geography in the last 30 years has been more
sceptical about the use of generalized theories, and has sought to
develop new kinds of less totalizing ways of creating theory.
Second, and related to this, the kinds of concepts that human geo-
graphers have made use of have come under critical scrutiny.
Human geographers have become doubtful about the capacity of
concepts such as class, capitalism, race, gender, society or nature to
reveal some kind of general truth of human existence. They now
increasingly see these concepts in a more modest light, recognizing
the limitations of their relevance. A third aspect of the cultural turn
is the diversification in what human geographers have studied and
the kinds of theories they develop. As the name implies, the cul-
tural turn in human geography has seen an enormous increase in
interest in the cultural aspects of social life, and cultural geographies
have proliferated in human geography. It has also addressed issues
about the very nature of knowledge, most notably around whether
it is possible to ‘represent’ the world. Non-representational the-
ories in human geography challenge the very idea that knowledge
should just be a representation of the world, and argue that human
geographers need to go beyond representation and think about the
practices of knowledge creation (see Chapters 4 and 7).
It is fair to say, however, that the cultural turn has been controversial
in the subject, with some human geographers criticizing what they
12 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

see as the splintering of the subject into many different areas of

interest that use different methodologies and are based on different
philosophical positions. Others are more optimistic, arguing that
this diversification only adds to the power and strength of human
geography as a holistic social science. Either way, it seems the
cultural turn has opened up a whole range of new dimensions
compared to the human geography of 40 years ago.
The history of human geography is therefore at an exciting
moment. Distinct schools of thought and approaches in human
geography undoubtedly exist and continue to develop in different
countries, with human geography in eastern Europe or Scandinavia
still retaining differences in approach and emphasis from those in
Britain and America. However, more importantly, in the 21st cen-
tury, human geography is studied and taught across the globe, with
the Western European and Anglo-American legacy becoming
increasingly diluted. New postcolonial human geographies are
becoming much more evident as human geographers in developing
countries bring new perspectives and ideas. Latin America, Asian
and African human geographers have become more evident, and
the subject has reflected on how its past was very much grounded
in a Western viewpoint. The history of human geography is there-
fore an increasingly diverse one, and this book is intended to pro-
vide an overview and introduction of many important topics rather
than some kind of exhaustive list. Its aim is to act simply as a start-
ing point for readers interested in exploring the breadth of human
geography in today’s world.

INSIDE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: KEY CONCEPTS AND

THEORIES
We next need to think about some of the major theoretical debates
within these different strands to the subject that will appear at var-
ious points throughout this book. This could be an enormous task,
but the important thing is to have some sense of some of the key
theoretical schools of thought and how they relate to social science
thinking more generally. In this respect, Table 1.2 tries to provide an
introductory overview of the relationships between some of the
major sub-disciplines identified in Table 1.1 and relate them both to
some of the major theoretical debates within those sub-disciplines
Table 1.2 Theoretical foundations to human geography
Area of human Theoretical approach Historical key Examples of related Examples of recent
geography or debate thinkers thought in the social geographical thinkers in this
sciences area
Philosophy of social Critical realism Émile Durkheim, Anthony Giddens (S) Ed Soja
science Actor network theory Max Weber, Andrew Sayer (S)
Structuration theory Michel Foucault Bruno Latour (PhS)
John Law (PhS)
Economic Political economy Karl Marx, Manuel Castells (S) David Harvey, Neil Smith,
Markets/ neoclassical Adam Smith, Paul Krugman (E) Brian Berry, Ron Boschma
economic theory David Ricardo,
Thorstein Veblen
New economic geography Karl Polanyi Trevor Barnes
Finance John Maynard Keynes Gordon Clark,
Andrew Leyshon
Regional/industrial Regional economies Alfred Marshall, Michael Porter (IB) Peter Dicken, Ron Martin,
Industrial development Nikolai Kondratieff Bjorn Asheim, Allen Scott,
Clusters/innovation Michael Storper,
Firms Henry Yeung
Social/cultural Consumptive geographies Michel Foucault, Zymunt Bauman (S) Nigel Thrift, Paul Cloke,
Emotional geographies/ Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Sarah Whatmore
affect Freud, Martin Heidegger,
Gilles Deleuze, Félix
Guattari
Table 1.2 (continued)
Area of human Theoretical approach Historical key Examples of related Examples of recent
geography or debate thinkers thought in the social geographical thinkers in this
sciences area
Historical cultural Landscape and Denis Cosgrove,
representation Derek Gregory
Political World systems theory Karl Marx Immanuel Wallerstein Peter Taylor, Kevin Cox
Critical geopolitics Benedict Andersen Gerard O’Tuathail
Development Post-development Edward Said Amartya Sen (D) Rob Potter,
Arturo Escobar (P) Stuart Corbridge
Environmental Sustainable development Ulrich Beck (S) Bill Adams, Yi Fu Tuan
Michael Watts
Urban Global urban system Walter Christaller Mike Davis (S), Peter Taylor,
Global cities Ernest Burgess Saskia Sassen (Pl), Doreen Massey,
Urban development Henri Lefebvre (Ph) David Ley
Feminist/queer The body Judith Butler (Ph) Linda McDowell,
Julia Kristeva (Ph) Gill Valentine
Iris Marion Young (Ph)
 INTRODUCTION 15

and with key thinkers both historically and in other social

science subjects. The table gives some examples of human geo-
graphers who have contributed to these debates in its final column.
This should assist in providing a way to think about the way in
which some of the major theoretical debates in human geography
are situated in the wider social sciences. However, across these
debates, we also need to think about some of the key concepts that
human geographers use to developing geographical theories of the
world.
Foremost are the concepts of space and place already mentioned.
With these two, it is important that the significance of time is also
highlighted. Much philosophical discussion exists about the inter-
relationship of space and time in many subjects, and it is well
established that you cannot really theorize one without the other. In
rejecting the objective ideas that human geography could become
some kind of ‘spatial science’, in the last 40 years the subject has
developed an understanding of space as something caught up in and
intrinsic to all human practices. For many human geographers,
questions about space thus become about something we might call
‘relative space’, with space defined through relationships between
human phenomena. However, there is no single definition that is
agreed upon. Rather, different strands of human geography have
developed different concepts of spaces, with some considering the
physical or material manifestations of space (think of cities or the
spatial distribution of industries) while others consider virtual, ima-
gined or symbolic spaces (the way in which we imagine areas of the
world such as the ‘West’ or ideas about the nature of cyberspace).
Human geography has thus become interested in a whole range of types
of spaces: examples include social, cultural, ‘organizational’, ‘corpo-
rate’ or the ‘embodied spaces’. Much use is also made in the subject
of different categorizations of space, the most obvious of which is the
idea of scale. Human geographers often talk about aspects of the social
world as existing or applying at a certain scale – the most common of
these being tend the ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘national’ and ‘global’.
However, the concept of scale is not unproblematic. Debates in the
subject have ranged over the usefulness or otherwise of these categories.
Where does the local end and the next scale ‘up’, so to speak, begin? On
the other side of the argument, things that are ‘global’ in the social
world are always related in one way or another to many different
16 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

localities. The global, in that sense, is always made up of things

which are local.
This leads us to the way in which human geographers’ ideas
about space and time give the concept of place a particular importance.
Places are usually understood as existing at the scale of the local, even
if the nature of that ‘localness’ is very much influenced by relationships
with other distant places and things. Much effort has been made in
human geography to think about what places are, and what that
means for how we understand the world. It is impossible to review
all of those ideas here, but in short human geographers see places as
mixture of history, spatial relations and sociality. Everything that
human beings do has to happen somewhere. Places are where social
relations come together in specific spatial arrangements that last
over time, often through what we might call the ‘materiality’ of the
world, and which in turn shape and influence the nature of future
social relations. Cities are perhaps the easiest examples of this.
Think about the nature of any large capital city in today’s world.
To understand its significance you need to appreciate a whole range
of factors including its long history, the layout and buildings, the cul-
ture of the people who live there, and those who pass through. All of
these aspects and others are situated together in place, and the nature
of many of them is a consequence of that ongoing interaction situ-
ated there.
It is important to emphasize, however, that closely related to
human geographers’ analysis of space are questions of time. Much
human geography considers how different spaces develop and
change over time, but also human geographers have been very
much concerned with the experience of space and time. The two
are seen as inseparable, with all human activity existing through
both dimensions. A very good example is the widely used idea of
time-space compression that geographers have made use of to
explore how in today’s world the world has ‘shrunk’ or become
‘smaller’ through globalization (Harvey 1989). Much Marxist
geography has been interested in how capitalism has spread across
the globe and how economic activity has evolved and changed in
different parts of the world. Understanding the unevenness of
capitalism across space is clearly impossible without appreciating
how these differences have emerged and changed over time. We
will consider these issues in more depth in the next chapter.
 INTRODUCTION 17

A second set of concepts that human geography makes a lot of

use of are the ideas of systems and structures. The concept of the
system is one that has been drawn from the physical sciences – physical
geographers of course study the world’s atmospheric or climate systems.
For human geography, the use of system as an idea by which to
understand the world is more difficult. Much social science beyond
human geography has also conceived of the world economy as, for
example, a global capitalist system or international politics as an
international political system. We will consider in Chapter 4 how
economic geographers have argued that ‘regional innovation systems’
are present in some successful regional economies around the
world. However, the extent to which human relations are systemic in
nature is also the subject of debate in human geography, with some
geographical thinking questioning the coherence and qualities of
the things being labelled as systems. A similar issue exists around the
concept of (social) structures in human geography. Structure is used
by some human geographers to refer to enduring characteristics of
human societies – Marxist geographers talk about class structures
whilst feminist geographers have used the idea of patriarchal
structures to conceptualize the uneven nature of relations between
men and women. Again, the postmodern shift in human geography
has questioned whether such things as coherent and consistent
social structures exist in the social world, and whether it is useful to
think of the social world in such rigid terms when there is a great
deal of complexity and dynamism in social relationships.
This relates to a third set of concepts of much concern to human
geographers today: agency, power and practice. All of these concepts
refer to social action in one way or another. Elsewhere in the social
sciences, there is a longstanding debate about the relationship
between enduring social structures such as class and the role of
individual social actors as individual agents. The key question is the
degree to which structures influence or control individuals, or
individuals reinforce or change the nature of structures. This structure
and agency debate has also been widely discussed by human geo-
graphers. More recently, however, in the wake of the cultural turn,
geographers have reframed this discussion around questions of how
power is understood, and how that relates to what people do in the
form of practices. Human geographers have become increasingly
interested in understanding the spatialized nature of power and
18 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

agency that, in many aspects of human life, has been significantly

reshaped by globalization. Chapters 2 and 5 consider, for example,
how globalization processes have changed the agency and power of
nation-states in relation to the growing number of transnational
firms and other global actors in today’s world.
A fourth important duo of concepts that have increasingly concerned
human geographers after the cultural turn is ‘knowledge’ and the
idea of discourse. The former is easy to understand in a commonsense
way, but human geography’s engagement with postmodern ideas
has led to a widespread interest in the politics of knowledge creation.
In this context, human geography has become concerned much
more with philosophical questions concerning what are known as
‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’. Put simply, ontology is the theory of
what exists in the world. Not all that exists might be knowable,
however, and this is where epistemology comes in. Epistemologies
are frameworks for knowing what it is possible to know, and hence
offer a method for creating knowledge. An important related concept
widely used by human geographers is that of a discourse. It is parti-
cular associated with the work of the French thinker Michel
Foucault (1926–84). The concept refers to certain frameworks of
knowledge that have been constructed over time, and how the
world is represented using those frameworks (whether that is verbally,
in writing or in other ways such as maps). For example, Chapter 4
examines further the complex relationship that various past geo-
graphical discourses have with the nature of international politics
and world history. The way in which geographical knowledge repre-
sented the world in a particular way and how that is bound up with
certain sets of power relationships between countries and cultures has
been a major focus of much cultural geography. Equally, ideas of
discourse run through the discussion of identities in Chapter 7.
Fifth, human geography makes extensive use of the broad con-
cepts of society, economy, culture and nature. Again, there is much
debate within the subject as to what these mean and how effective
they are at isolating one dimension of the world we live in. Chapters 2
and 5 consider, for example, the various ways in which human
geographers have thought about the economy, and the processes
that make up economies – most notably those of producing goods
or services, and consuming them. However, it also considers how
economic geographers in particular have become dissatisfied with
 INTRODUCTION 19

the idea that the economy can be understood in isolation from social
and cultural aspects of life. Much work in economic geography
examines how economic activity is embedded in cultural ideas and
social practices within given places or organizations such as firms.
Equally, there is an ongoing debate in the subject about the relation-
ship between human culture and the so-called ‘natural’ world. As
several of the chapters in this book will discuss, social, cultural and
economic geographers have argued at length that what we mean by
nature is a social construction (albeit in different ways). On the one
hand, Marxist geographers have argued that nature is produced and
that human beings’ economic needs are bound up with the physical
reality of what we called the natural world. In a different vein of
thinking, cultural geographers argue that the category of nature itself is
part of human imagination and should therefore be understood as part
of culture. No more is this more evident that in debates about what
is meant by the idea of ‘landscape’ considered in Chapter 4.
Finally, a growing body of work within human geography today
is concerned with conceptions of the subject, identity, self and
other. Again much of this work has come to the fore in the wake
of the cultural turn. Human geography in recent decades has been
very much concerned to examine what it means to be a human
being – a human subject. In this respect, the idea of this human
subjectivity has been theorized around at least four aspects: the
body, the self, the person and identity (Thrift and Pile 1995). These
concepts of subjectivity have become important as they provide a
critique of the idea that geographical knowledge can be objective,
dispassionate and nothing to do with the person creating the
knowledge. Much human geography today is therefore concerned
about the so-called positionality of the writer, researcher or
knowledge-creator and how that is bound up with the nature of
the knowledge that is created.
Related to this use of the idea of subjectivity, human geographers
in many different sub-disciplines – social, cultural, political geo-
graphy – make use of the concepts of identity, self and other in
conceptualizing how people understand who they are and how
they differ from others. Chapter 7 explores these concepts in more
depth, but regarding identity, the most important thing to know
about human geographical understandings of these ideas is that they
are multiple and complex. Human geographers argue that it is
20 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

usually better to talk about multiple identities rather than identity in

the singular and that identity is therefore not based on any ‘innate’
quality of an individual or group but rather exists in relation to how
we see similarities and differences in others. The concept of the
‘other’ is important in this respect as it tries to capture how people
or things in the abstract are represented as opposite or different to
oneself. Much geographical work on postcolonialism has used this
concept to understand how western cultures were historically under-
stood as superior to those of the East.

FURTHER READING: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY AND ITS

CENTRAL IDEAS
There are plenty of textbooks that attempt to cover the breadth of human
geography as a subject, but most are caught between the poles of trying to be
comprehensive and linking the main overlapping themes in the subject. No
single book succeeds fully on both fronts so you are advised to look at more
than one. Here are a few of the most useful (in alphabetical as opposed to any
order of preference):

Cloke, P., Crang, P. and Goodwin, M. (2012) Introducing Human Geographies

[3rd Edition]. London: Hodder Arnold.
Does a very good job on conceptual overviews but takes a more specific angle
on some of the topics within human geography. You might look at other
books to supplement its take on economic geography.

Daniels, P., Bradshaw, M., Shaw, D. and Sidaway, J. (2012) An Introduction to

Human Geography; Issues for the 21st Century. Harlow: Pearson.
Another comprehensive textbook that takes a more thematic approach to how
it covers the topics concerning human geographers with conceptual ideas
woven in. This book is stronger on economic, environmental and political
geography, and you might look for supplementary reading on cultural topics.

Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (eds) (2009) The Dictionary
of Human Geography [5th edition]. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
This book is generally regarded as an essential resource for students of human
geography, and its latest edition is probably as close as it is possible to be to
comprehensive in covering the subject within one volume. It is better used as a
resource to ‘dip’ into since the dictionary format is less good at bringing out
the linkages between different debates (even though of course the entries are
thoroughly cross-referenced).
 INTRODUCTION 21
Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. and Valentine, G. (eds) (2004) Key Thinkers on Space
and Place. London: Sage.
An extremely useful book to give you an idea of different perspectives on the
central conceptual ideas in human geography. It does so by examining the
ideas of a range of different human geographers and other social scientists
widely used by geographers.

Nayak, A. and Jeffrey, A. (2011) Geographical Thought: An Introduction to Ideas in

Human Geography. Harlow: Pearson.
This is an excellent up-to-date and in-depth overview of the conceptual and
philosophical debates in human geography today.

Thrift, N. and Kitchin, R. (2009) International Encyclopaedia of Human

Geography. London: Elsevier.
With 12 volumes and a price tag of more than US$3,000, you won’t be picking
this up yourself off Amazon, but it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive and
detailed resource on the subject. You will need to have access to a library that
holds it, though.
 2

GLOBALIZATION

This chapter examines how human geography addresses the major

issue facing the contemporary world – the concept of globalization.
It explores how in contrast to other social science subjects, human
geography offers a distinctive approach, with its primary concern for
the nature of space and place.

GLOBALIZATION
The history of the last 50 years or so has been a period during which
human societies on planet Earth have become more interconnected
than ever before. This is what the word ‘globalization’ means at its
broadest level, and the concept is often described as being a ‘catch-all’
or an ‘umbrella’ idea because it is used with reference to the
increasing interconnectedness across the globe of almost every aspect
of human life. Globalization is not just about economic activity
(although many people do use it exclusively in that way), but also
about all kinds of changes to our existence. That means changes to
society, cultures, politics, technologies, the environment and so on.
Globalization is therefore about more than the growth of global
corporations such as McDonald’s or the fact that you can buy iPods
everywhere. It is also about the effect of many new aspects to life in
today’s world – for example, the effect of the emergence of the
 GLOBALIZATION 23

internet, the massive growth in cheap air travel, the international pol-
itics of addressing climate change or the rise of ‘global’ TV shows
you can watch wherever you are on the planet. Globalization is about
the emergence (or not) of an integrated human society on Earth.
The word ‘globalization’ itself is, however, only a recent term for
this integration. Its origins go back the 1950s and 1960s with ideas
like ‘the global village’ and ‘spaceship Earth’ adding to the sense
of a ‘shrinking world’. But it is only since the late 1980s that the
concept has been propelled into widespread usage by social scientists
in several subjects from management studies to sociology. These
days the term is ever present in popular discussion among politicians
and in the media, but often it is only used in that narrower sense, to
refer to the economic aspects of life.
In contrast to the popular uses of the word, and in common with
other social scientists, human geographers have tried to develop a more
sophisticated understanding of globalization. They often therefore
imagine globalization to be some kind of general process of change, or
a set of processes, which are dramatically altering the relationships
between people and places, and generating new networks of activity
and flows of people, ideas and things across regions and continents.
This increasing interconnectedness has of course been going on for
a long time historically speaking, as the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago
or the Chinese empire (often called the ‘Celestial’ Empire) in the
Middle Ages, both corresponded to earlier but more limited forms
of this kind of integration. The important difference, however, is the
increasing range, speed and intensity of interconnections that have
developed in the last couple of centuries broadly, and the last 50 years
most particularly. Since the end of the Second World War, the so-called
‘shrinking world’ has been shrinking like never before, and the pace of
interconnectedness dramatically increased. Geographers and others have
come up with several ideas to encapsulate this – the ‘annihilation of
space by time’, ‘time-space convergence’ and ‘time-space
compression’. All see globalization as a change in the way in which
we experience space and time. This makes globalization an idea very
much at home with the heart of human geographers’ interests, since in
many ways places are where these changes to our experience of time
and space come together.
As a subject, human geography is sometimes said to have been
late to join the so-called globalization debate. Much of this debate
24 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

is dominated either by journalists or commentators writing from a

policy viewpoint, or by political scientists from the theoretical side.
This may be in part because human geographers found early glo-
balization theories rather simplistic, particularly those that famously
argued that globalization represented an ‘end of geography’ because
everywhere was increasingly becoming ‘the same’. Whatever the
reason, in truth the popular globalization debate probably found
the more complex approach to globalization from geography hard to
grasp. Geographical thinking has often tended to focus on the
complexity of the changes brought about by globalization, rather
than presenting simpler stories of how the world is becoming
interlinked (like the journalist Thomas Friedman’s argument that
the world is now ‘flat’) (Friedman 2007). It has also interrogated the
uneven and complex way an integrated free market capitalist global
economy has emerged over time, and contributed to under-
standings of how the ongoing development of markets for goods
and services in the global economy does not necessarily conform to
the idealized models of economists (see box).

ADAM SMITH, THE MARKET AND FREE TRADE

Since the mid-20th century, the logic of economic globalization has
been widely associated with the benefits of free market capitalism. In
the last 60 years, countries have increasingly organized their econo-
mies around markets for goods and services rather than adopting
the planned approach towards producing goods and services taken
by communist countries. In the early 21st century, almost every
country on the planet now has some kind of free market economy
(with a few remaining exceptions, such as Cuba and North Korea).
A significant body of social scientific theory (including human
geography) argues that free market capitalism leads to maximum
benefit in the global economy in terms of both the most efficient allo-
cation of resources and the greatest amount of production. An
important basis to these arguments is the thought of the 18th-century
political economist Adam Smith (1723–90). Smith famously argued
in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of
Nations that, in contrast to the highly regulated systems of produc-
tion and trade at that existed at that time, markets were the best
way for people and countries to allocate economic resources. Where
 GLOBALIZATION 25

markets for goods or services exist, the process of markets operating

(people offering things for sale and others buying them) meant that
the optimum use of resources was achieved. Smith called this ‘the
invisible hand of the market’. Importantly, he argued that this applied
not only to individuals and groups at a local level but to entire
countries and the whole world economy. Smith’s ideas remain the
underpinning for modern neoclassical economics and the argument
that the global economy should have free trade between countries
rather than nation-states protecting their economies with restrictions
on what can be imported into their territories.

For example, economic geographers focus on the complexity of

how manufactured goods are made through complex global pro-
duction networks that are shaped by many national and regional
political contexts and factors. Equally, political geographers have
examined the complex politics of global environmental change that
involve many actors at different scales from individuals to city
governments to transnational organizations such as the UN. This
appreciation of complexity certainly gives the subject the advantage
of a more sophisticated understanding of globalization, but it has
probably hindered the profile of geographers as significant contributors
to the wider globalization debate.

THE WORLD SYSTEM

Prior to the recent debate, human geographers had been making

use of an earlier idea that in many ways is a forerunner to the
concept of globalization. This is the idea that human society on
Earth is part of some kind of world system. This approach to the-
orizing world society has its roots in the classical social theories
of 19th-century thinkers including those of Karl Marx and Max
Weber, which respectively examined the historical emergence of a
capitalist system for organizing economic activity (see box on p. 26),
and the rise of institutions and organizations in the modern era (roughly
since the 17th century). Capitalism is probably the most important
concept of a social system used by human geographers. It refers to a
form of both economic and social organization where the activities of
26 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

producing goods and services are separated from both the people
who own the means to produce things (capitalists) and those who
do the work of production (labour).

MARX’S THEORY OF CAPITALISM

Karl Marx’s arguments about the nature of the economic system we
know as capitalism remain highly influential theories even well over a
century after his death in 1883. Marx was a 19th-century philosopher
and political economist who is probably most famous for his political
pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (1848) written with Friedrich
Engels. However, this short book is only really what we would see as
a policy document drawn from the substantial body of his scholarly
three-volume work on economy and society, Das Kapital. We have
already met another early key thinker about capitalism – Adam
Smith – but Marx’s thought represents another important and con-
trasting set of ideas.
Marx adopted an historical approach to understanding the nature
of economic activity, and his work examines how the medieval feudal
system in Western Europe based on agriculture and the rule of
monarchs evolved into an industrial economic system based on
money and private property. Marx argues that the key issue is the
way that those with money (capitalists) invest in the production of
goods and services by buying land, machines and (importantly)
labour. The aim of capitalists is to make a profit by selling goods for
more than the total cost of the inputs into their production.
Especially significant is that one of the major ways capitalists do this
is by paying labour as little as possible.
A further stage in his work theorizes the impact of this economic
change on societies. Central is the emergence of different social classes
based on those who accumulate wealth (the capitalists) and those
offering labour (the working class). For Marx, this capitalist eco-
nomic system contains a series of problems and contradictions.
The major one is that the whole system depends on people buying the
goods being made by capitalist industry but, in seeking to increase
profits, capitalists have an incentive to pay lower and lower wages. Over
time, this means that demand for goods collapses and production is
no longer profitable. Capitalists make a loss and sack their workers,
making the problem yet worse. This represents a Marxist basis for
 GLOBALIZATION 27

understanding what we these days call the ‘business cycle’ of periods

of economic growth (boom) and recession (bust).
Geographers have made much use of a whole range of updated
Marxist approaches, not all sticking to the historically specific argu-
ments of Marx in the 19th century (which have been widely criticized).
One of the uses to which geographers have put Marxist under-
standings of capitalism is to explain uneven economic development,
and the geography of economic growth and crisis. For example,
David Harvey has argued that the capitalist system’s response to
crisis is inherently geographical: when a crisis affects one region of
the world’s economy, capital investment looks to new places to
restore profitability in what he terms ‘a spatial fix’ (Harvey 2007).

The concept of a system is itself actually a metaphor taken from the

natural sciences, where for example the Earth’s climate and living
organisms are understood as being systems. The degree to which
human social life is also composed of things that look like systems
is, however, the subject of continued debate. Nevertheless, in
human geography the concept of the system is most widely asso-
ciated with the way it was developed by a social historian called
Immanuel Wallerstein (born 1930) who proposed what is known as
‘world systems theory’ in the 1970s. This is in essence an early kind
of globalization theory. It argues that capitalism has become the
dominant form of economic organization, spreading across the
globe since the 16th century, and that this forms the basis for
the modern world system we live in today. Wallerstein suggests that
other forms of world system did exist in the past (the Roman and
Chinese empires are examples of this), but that they were not as
geographically extensive as capitalism has become. Looking at the
world map of the late 20th century, Wallerstein argued that the world
could be divided into core and peripheral areas. The core corre-
sponded to the wealthier countries (Western Europe, North America,
Australia and Japan), and the periphery of the less-developed world
(Africa, Latin America and much of Asia). The Marxist aspect to
this approach comes from the argument in world system’s theory that
the core areas derived surplus value (i.e. profits) from peripheral
ones. Now, while Wallerstein was not a geographer, political
28 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

geographers have made much use of this theoretical approach

and developed ideas of the world system. However, since the rise of
globalization as a concept, the idea of the world system has been more
broadly used to include, for example, the nature of the relationships
between states at the level of international politics. In the ongoing
debates within human geography regarding the nature of any world
system, an important issue continues to be the degree to which the
metaphor of a system is suitable. Much political geography points to
the complex and diverse relations between states, regions and dif-
ferent actors in today’s world, and it is not altogether clear that
these interactions resemble the systems that natural scientists discuss
(and in that sense whether society is systemic in nature).

GLOBAL SOCIETY

Linked to debates about globalization and the nature of any world

system is the idea that a global society has emerged in the last 50 years
or so. Social sciences of the 19th and early 20th centuries – including
geography – saw societies as largely contained within specific
countries, nation-states or regions of the world. The basic assumption
was that people lived in geographically restricted communities that
marked the boundaries of many different societies across the planet.
Since the latter part of the 20th century the argument that has
arisen is that these boundaries have broken down or been eroded,
and that the wider integration of states, institutions and other activities
has produced an integration of state societies into three distinctive
blocs. Geographers characterized world society in the second half of
the 20th century around a three-way division: a ‘First World’
composed of the advanced industrial countries (North America,
Western Europe, Australia and Japan); a communist ‘Second World’
(USSR, Eastern Europe, China); and the developing ‘Third World’
(Central And South America, Africa, non-communist Asia).
Subsequently, integration has become much more pronounced with
the globalization of recent decades. It is now hard to talk about
American or Chinese society as being in any complete way isolated
from the rest of human society elsewhere on earth because of various
globalization processes.
It is important to remember, however, that this idea of global
society does not mean that all human societies have become the
 GLOBALIZATION 29

same (sometimes termed ‘homogeneity’). People across the globe

still live in very different social environments in terms of the organi-
zations they experience, the laws they are governed by and the
customs and practices of everyday life. The issue is more the degree
to which these differences have been diluted everywhere on Earth
by increasing levels of similarity. Human geographers are interested
in a range of aspects of this process – for example, analysing how
flows of people through migration and travel affect the nature of
society and lead to the development of common features across
the globe. Geographical thinking has also been concerned with the
emergence of what is known as a ‘global civil society’. Civil society
here is used to refer to the organizations that exist beyond govern-
ments, legal institutions and other official bodies. This generally means
voluntary and community organizations, charities and other kinds
of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Again, until the last
couple of decades, civil society was understood to be part of the
wider society existing within individual states. However, globaliza-
tion processes have led to the internationalization of these groups
and activities, hence the idea that civil society has also become
global. Famous examples include many campaign groups, such as
Greenpeace and Amnesty International or charities such as Oxfam.
Much of global civil society is thus formal inasmuch as it exists around
various organizations, but the concept also covers other activities
(often termed as occurring at the ‘grass roots’), which are informal
practices and do not have anything to do with a specific organization.

GEOPOLITICS

The concept of geopolitics has had a long and mixed history over
the last century or so, and it is notoriously difficult to define since
its meaning has changed between periods of history. Nevertheless,
it is very much central to human geography and in particular to the
sub-discipline of ‘political geography’. In fact the origins of geo-
graphy as a subject have much to do with this concept and with what
is also known more broadly as a ‘geopolitical tradition’ of thought.
In order to understand the importance of this concept it is useful
to distinguish between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ geopolitics. The word
‘geopolitics’ was supposedly coined by a right-wing Swedish politi-
cian, Rudolf Kjellén, in 1899, but it only entered wider circulation
30 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

after the First World War. What emerged were various forms of tradi-
tional geopolitical thinking that sought to develop theories of the
power struggles over territory between nation-states. Geopolitics in this
traditional sense refers to the way that geographical factors and other
‘spatial’ relationships shape international politics – this includes things
like the rise and fall of nations and why they engage in conflict and war.
In other words, geography shapes the nature of politics at the interna-
tional scale (albeit in terms of a rather simplistic definition of geography
in terms of land, rivers, mountains, oceans and natural resources).
While there were many variants to traditional geopolitics, in rela-
tion to the history of and current thinking within human geography,
at least three aspects are worth highlighting. The first is the influential
ideas of the famous British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861–
1947). Although Mackinder never actually used the word itself
(Sidaway 2008), he sought to develop geography as a subject that
would be useful to politicians and others for governing nation-states.
He was particularly concerned with a state’s security and with threats
from one state to another (known as external ‘Powers’). In trying to
understand how geography affected international politics, his famous
contribution was what is known as his ‘Heartland thesis’ of 1919.
This argued that Central Asia was a crucial region in the unfolding
political history of the world. Whichever state controlled this territory
would, argued Mackinder, have the potential for world domination.
Whether this happened or not would be determined by whichever state
controlled Eastern Europe (a pivot area), and also whether the state or
states on the edge of the Heartland (known as the outer rim) took
preventative action. At that point in time, the implication was that
Britain needed to support the creation of a ‘buffer zone’ around the
Heartland to protect the then globally extensive British Empire.
A second key element to traditional geopolitics is ‘the organic
theory of the state’. The idea here is that any nation-state or country
can be understood as being like a living organism. The theory was
first laid out by a German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, and was then
later elaborated by another German geographer, Karl Haushofer, in
the early years of the 20th century. One of the most important
outcomes of this metaphorical link between the idea of a state and
an organism was the notion that, like plants and animals, states need
space to grow. This ‘living space’ (or lebensraum in German) became
notoriously linked to ideas in Nazi (Fascist) Germany in the 1930s.
 GLOBALIZATION 31

It formed part of the intellectual argument at the time as to why

Germany needed to expand in the Second World War. Rather
more horrifically, German geopolitics of the 1920s and 1930s
combined arguments about lebensraum with a geographical under-
standing of racial/territorial ‘purity’. In that sense, traditional geopolitics
also contributed important intellectual foundations for the Holocaust,
in which millions of Jewish people and those of other minority groups
were murdered. What is less well known, however, is the wider impact
of this kind of traditional geopolitics on other states even after the
Second World War. For example, the organic theory of the state is
also significant in South American history, where the metaphor of
the state as organism was also extended in the 1970s and 1980s.
Military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina drew on these kinds
of theories to suggest that resistance to their regimes corresponded to
subversive ‘cancers’ that needed to be eliminated (Sidaway 2008).
Finally, no consideration of traditional geopolitics would be
complete without mention of ‘Cold War era’ geopolitics (see box).
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the world map was
redrawn for more than 40 years along a new political division:
superpower rivalry and conflict between the capitalist US-led West
and the communist Soviet-led East. In the era of nuclear weapons,
fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) shifted international
conflict away from direct military confrontation towards other
means. Geopolitical thinking proliferated in this world, with for
example US foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s being based on
‘containment theory’. This involved a strategy whereby the US
tried to contain the influence of the USSR by encircling it with
governments sympathetic to US interests. The worry was that com-
munism would spread like a disease from one country to its neighbours
much like a line of dominoes. Fear of this ‘domino effect’ produced
the policies that led to US involvement in the Korean and Vietnam
Wars as well as its treatment of communist Cuba.

THE COLD WAR (1946–1991)

The Cold War began very soon after the end of the Second World
War, and was a conflict between the two superpower nation-states
that emerged – the capitalist US and the communist USSR. It was so
named because the two main states did not engage in direct military
32 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

conflict (underpinned by a fear of the use of nuclear weapons on

each other and their allies). Rather, it was a period of hostile rela-
tions between these states, where each feared any increase in the
territorial influence of the other. Through the Cold War international
security was largely maintained by the superpowers’ huge military
strength and their dominance in their regions of influence. However,
that did not mean that wars did not occur but that they occurred ‘by
proxy’ as each superpower sponsored different sides in various civil
wars in regions outside of their territory. Examples include the war
on the Korean peninsula during the 1950s, where the USSR and
communist China backed the Korean communists and ended up
controlling North Korea while the US and its allies held the South.
The Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 1970s is another
example. During the later Cold War period, aside from these proxy
wars and the kind of espionage that forms the plot of so many
James Bond films, the superpowers engaged in ongoing competitive
weapons proliferation with both states building up huge arsenals of
nuclear weapons and conventional armies. By the 1980s, the effect
on the USSR’s economy of this expenditure was substantial and the
overstretching of resources to fund the military build-up is widely
considered to be a factor leading to the eventual collapse of the
USSR in 1991. With the transition to capitalism of Russia and other
post-Soviet states from the early 1990s, the Cold War came to an end.

However, human geography today has increasingly rejected this

politically neutral view of geographical factors, arguing that the
influence of geography is neither invariable nor timeless. Rather,
the nature of geographical influences on politics is specific to his-
torical and cultural circumstances. Such a perspective underpins
what is known as the (new) critical geopolitics and has emerged largely
in response to the postmodern- and poststructuralist-inspired ‘cul-
tural turn’ within the subject since the 1980s. Several strands to this
critical geopolitics have been influential in the last couple of decades.
First, drawing on postmodern ideas, critical geopolitics has been
concerned with the language of geopolitics. The key idea here is that of
geopolitical discourse. As discussed in the Introduction, the French
philosopher and social historian Michel Foucault used the concept of
 GLOBALIZATION 33

discourse in the 1980s to demonstrate how language does not capture

any kind of timeless universal truth about the world, but is more
like a framework of meaning that is subjective and politicized.
Applying this idea to geopolitics means – in contrast to Mackinder’s
view – that geopolitics is not simply about describing truths and facts
about world society. Rather it is the study of the power relation-
ships and political motivations that produce certain specific under-
standings of the world political map. These understandings have
emerged from very specific cultural contexts and motivations – the
Cold War view of the US about the world map and its fight against
communism is a good example. Political geographers today are
therefore more concerned with how global space is ‘written’ with
meaning, and this kind of critical approach can be applied to any
political description of the world.
A second element of critical geopolitics examines how geopolitical
practices in the wider world – that is, what politicians, states and
other actors ‘do’ – are important in creating senses of identity that
are the basis for modern nation-states. Geographers have argued
that national identity is not something that happens naturally but is
in fact remade and reshaped as nation-states define who is ‘us’ and
who is ‘them’. This activity does not therefore simply reflect differ-
ences that already exist between groups of people in places across
the world, it also creates them.
Finally, a third important feature of the new critical geopolitics is
an interest in popular culture and how the world political map is
represented in wider society. Critical geopolitics argues that it is not
just the views of presidents and prime ministers that matter in
international politics, but the way in which the citizens of states
across the planet understand the rest of the world. This varies, and
popular culture, like television and film, is a major way in which
societies come to imagine the world. The key thing is the interaction
between popular geopolitical ideas and the way politicians use these
images and narratives that resonate with their citizens. For example,
human geographers have pointed to the way that sport metaphors
have been an instrumental element in US geopolitical discourses
around 20th-century conflict. In the American popular imagina-
tion, foreign conflict is justified because the US has to compete ‘to
stay on top’, much as you might talk about a baseball or other kind
of sports team trying to get to the top of its league.
34 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

GOVERNANCE

In general terms, governance refers to the framework of governing

practices that political bodies, organizations or other institutions
undertake (such as national parliaments or supranational organiza-
tions like the United Nations). The word is a little ambiguous,
though, and human geographers tend to use it in more ways than is
found in political science. The problem is that it tends to be used in
terms of the nature of these organizations themselves and also to
describe the relationships between them. Governance then is both
about the activity of governing and the collection of actors who go
about doing it. What is more, although most commonly used with
reference to an everyday understanding of ‘politics’, human geo-
graphy also make use of more specific types of governance which
are sometimes less obviously about what you might associate with
‘politics’. The distinction rests between what you might call capital
‘P’ Politics – elections, national governments, the dealings of pro-
fessional politicians and so on – and ‘politics’ without the capital,
which refers to the multitude of everyday political interactions
involved in every aspect of human life (within families, workplaces
or indeed any organization). Economic geographers, for example,
have also become interested in the more specific issue of economic
governance at all scales down to individual firms, not just at the
level of national economies (which is more like the usage of this
concept in economics, management and regional science). The
important thing to emphasize, therefore, is that governance means
much more than just the activity of elected governments in nation-
states. In this respect, we need to consider these different aspects to
this idea in human geography more closely.
Concerning ‘political governance’, the distinction between a
geographical and political science interest centres on the issue of
spatiality. Human geographers are particularly concerned with the
spatial nature of the activities of governing and have been critical of
the overemphasis on nation-states as ‘containers’ of governance in
other subjects (such as political science and international relations).
As mentioned earlier, globalization has had a dramatic impact on
the capacity of nation-states to govern their own territories in all
kinds of ways. Examples would be the lack of power national
governments have over global corporations who make decisions
 GLOBALIZATION 35

about where to locate factories and hence where jobs are created.
Equally, the growth in the number and increasing power of supra-
national institutions such as the European Union, the
International Criminal Court and the United Nations means
that national governments now have to share governing activity
with an ever-growing number of actors that are ‘bigger’ than states.
Equally, in cultural terms, national governments no longer have the
capacity to tightly govern national newspapers, television and other
media. In this way, the cultural aspects of life are also escaping
national level governance. Geography is therefore also interested in
the question of how globalization is changing governance in today’s
world and in the many different kinds of actors that produce ‘global
governance’. An important idea here is that there is increasingly global
governance without were being single world government – that is,
the world is still effectively governed but, unlike in past eras, there
is no one state or governing power that has oversight over every-
thing. One of the big debates (political) geographers are involved in
here is the degree to which this new era of global governance is
adequate for tackling the many problems that face global society. For
example, geographical thinking has much to say on climate change
and whether new attempts at global governance – such as the 1997
Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions – can tackle the pro-
blem of global warming. Another example would be the global
financial crisis of 2007–9, with geographers again seeking to under-
stand what kinds of new governance are needed to prevent a financial
crisis in one region from spreading across the global economy.
Following on from this, economic geographers have also been
interested in governance in more specific ways. Three things that
need governing in today’s global world are becoming the focus of
more and more attention: firms, economies and markets. While the
2007 financial crisis has prompted more work on the last of these,
geographers are also grappling with how, for example, ever larger
transnational firms such as Microsoft or Nestlé in many ways escape
the governing powers of national governments There is also a
growing interest in how large global firms govern themselves
(known as corporate governance), which is no longer so
straightforward as it once was, with companies having operations in
dozens of countries and employing tens of thousands of people
across the globe.
36 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

GEO-ECONOMIES

Most people understand an economy to mean the economic activ-

ity taking place within a nation-state, but globalization has dramati-
cally changed this. One of the leading economic geographers, Peter
Dicken, coined the idea of a ‘geo-economy’ to describe the geo-
graphically uneven nature of economic activity (Dicken 2011). The
term could of course be applied to economic activity within
nation-states, but Dicken has long been concerned with ‘economic
globalization’, and has, since the early 1980s, mapped the develop-
ment of globalized production and the internationalization of manu-
facturing and other industries. Dicken argues that the world economy
today should be understood as a complex set of globalized geo-
economies. This argument stands in contrast to the traditional view
that nation-states each have an economy based and largely contained
in the territory they govern. Dicken’s point is that globalization has
opened up serious questions about what we mean when we refer,
for example, to the US, German or Australian economies. He argues
that globalization has produced ‘a new geo-economy’ that is different
from previous eras in terms of how the processes of production, con-
sumption and distribution are organized. All three of these processes
no longer just happen in a small number of specific places within
states, but exist as connections of many activities between places
that are linked through flows of material objects (manufactured
goods, components) and non-material elements (ideas, knowledge,
services). The new global geo-economy is made up of many networks
that span the whole globe, with different actors (individual workers,
firms, consumers, nation-states) linked into these networks as
‘nodes’ in different ways.

TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS (TNCS)

Economic geographers have argued that the major actors in the

new globalized geo-economy are ‘transnational corporations’
(TNCs). Unfortunately, this is another ambiguous term because the
idea of a TNC is the successor to earlier (and similar) concepts – the
multinational corporation (MNC) or multinational enterprise (MNE).
These acronyms are all, however, often still used interchangeably
elsewhere in social science writing, and care needs to be taken.
Essentially, the ‘trans-’ prefix in TNC intends to imply that large
 GLOBALIZATION 37

international firms now exist ‘across’ national economic borders

rather than just operating in multiple countries (as the prefix ‘multi-’
denotes). Economic geographers have charted and mapped the rise
of such corporations since the 1980s, but it was really in the 1990s
that the term TNC came to be used for some of the largest, most glo-
balized firms. Occasionally, TNCs may also be referred to as ‘global
corporations’ but this concept is used lazily, and any differences between
this and the more technical terms ‘TNC’ or ‘MNC’ are unclear.
The theoretical basis for distinguishing between a ‘multinational’,
a ‘transnational’ or even a ‘global’ firm rests on the degree to which
these economic actors are globalized in three dimensions: how they
produce goods or services, where they sell them (markets) and how
the firm is set up as an organization. Some business commentators
started talking about ‘global corporations’ as early as the 1970s, but
in reality these companies only operated in a handful of countries at
that time and in many ways just repeated their operations in each
country separately. Car-makers such as Ford of General Motors, for
example, bought foreign firms like Vauxhall in the UK or Opel in
Germany, which made cars in their respective national markets. In
other words, multinational firms became multinational either by
setting up new, wholly separate operations in another country or by
buying up existing foreign firms that already made the same pro-
ducts in another country. Since the 1980s, however, this has chan-
ged in several ways. First, there are far more firms operating in many
countries and many different industries. While early multinationals
tended to be in mineral extraction or manufacturing, service
industries such as banking, hospitality (hotel chains), retail and
software are all increasingly dominated by transnational firms (see
box below). Second, today’s transnational firms are not just com-
panies from the rich global North but from many economies.
Several of the biggest transnational shipping companies originate
from Singapore, for example, and large oil and mineral companies
have emerged from Latin America and Australia. Nine of the top
ten steel firms in 2010 were Asian. Third, transnational firms these
days are set up very differently, with companies organizing many
parts of their business at a global rather than a national scale. New
product research, finance and advertising are all run at the global level
where once each national operation had its own research or finance
department. That is what the idea of a shift to a transnational or
38 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

global corporate organization form is about. However, economic

geographers point to the highly variable and uneven way in which
this shift has taken place. Some companies now are very much
transnational whereas others, despite being very large, are much less
so. It varies between firms of different sizes, from different countries
of origin and in different industries.

WALMART, CARREFOUR AND TESCO: THE BATTLE

OF THE TRANSNATIONAL GROCERY FIRMS
A few years ago a cartoon in a UK newspaper pictured two scientists
in NASA. One is asking the other: ‘What is our twenty-year strategy?’
His colleague replies: ‘To get to Mars before Tesco does … ’
Now the British food retailer Tesco may be some way from inter-
planetary expansion, but as the cartoon suggests, like the other largest
transnational food retail firms, its global reach is enormous. In fact,
Tesco is only the fourth largest food transnational in the world, the
largest being the US firm Walmart and the second largest the French
company Carrefour. Both of these companies also operate in at least
15 different countries. However, the transnational nature of their
business far exceeds merely the number of countries in which these
firms have stores, and the cartoon mentioned above hints at greater
power, influence and global capacities. Probably more significant
than the tally of countries that these firms operate in is how they
organize, manage and exert considerable power over global production
networks. Supermarket chains now exert enormous influence over
food production and distribution across the globe. If you go into a
supermarket in most western countries (and increasingly many less
developed countries), you will find a vast array of different products
that have been sourced planet-wide. Fresh produce such as fruit and
vegetables are often grown specifically to supply supermarket chains
with chilled distribution networks ensuring shelves are always
stocked. Fresh blueberries bought in Britain or Germany may have
been grown by one supplier firm in Guatemala one week and by
another in Morocco the next. Companies like Tesco source their
thousands of goods worldwide through different buying relationships
and sometimes through collaborations with supplier firms.
Transnational food retailing firms are thus in themselves major
actors in globalization, shaping economic activity, employment and
 GLOBALIZATION 39

flows of goods and people between numerous parts of the world.

Increasingly more and more of the global population are consuming
food produced and distributed through these complex global
production and distribution systems that food retailers manage and
control. Harder to measure, but equally significant, these transnational
food retailers are changing cultural attitudes and food consumption
practices worldwide.

An important debate within human geography beyond a narrow eco-

nomic emphasis concerns the growing power and influence of TNCs
(and whether or not that is a good thing). As their numbers and size
continue to increase, these very large firms dominate global markets in
all sectors of goods and services and they account for an increasing
proportion of total global output. This has significant impacts on
people’s lives across the globe. Social and political geographers have, for
example, examined the role TNCs have played in deindustrialization
(see Chapter 4) and the effect that has had on communities in the older
industrial economies as traditional manufacturing jobs have dis-
appeared. Think of the decline of cities like Detroit in the US, or the
north-east of England and its steel industry (the remnants of which are
now owned by an Asian TNC). Equally, there is the consequence of
manufacturing being located by firms in new places where wages are
low: many of the clothes and shoes sold by Western high-street
retailers are manufactured in factories located in China, Vietnam or
Indonesia that have often been criticized for their ‘sweatshop’
working conditions. Political geographers have also added to debates
concerning the eroding ability of nation-states to control economic
activity within national territories as investment decisions about where
to site production now fall to these corporations. The ability of TNCs
to open and close productive operations, along with their ability to
avoid regulation and taxes by shifting production to cheaper, less highly
taxed and regulated locations, has led critical commentators to argue
that they have become too powerful in the context of contemporary
globalization. In recent years, they have certainly also become the target
for campaigns, boycotts and protests by anti-globalization groups who
see them as negative influences on democracy and the distribution of
wealth (see the box on ‘No Logo’ in Chapter 3). Furthermore, such
40 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

debates have a strong cultural dimension insofar as the goods manu-

factured and services provided by TNCs shape cultural practices across
the globe in complex ways. A burgeoning Chinese and Indian middle
class are consuming the same global brands and products as Americans
and Europeans, and this is undoubtedly a transformative experience
shifting social norms and cultural ideas in those regions of the world.
Overall, excessively positive or negative claims about TNCs should
be treated with caution since the term now refers to an increasingly
large and diverse number of often very different firms. Human geo-
graphers have been critical of how much thinking about globalization
is often simplistic and sweeping in its criticism or praise of TNCs and
the institutions that are seen to govern their activities in the global
economy. Equally, they see the impact on politics and culture of these
firms as complex. In reality, there is a growing body of research that
points to the complex relationship between TNCs as the key eco-
nomic actors in the global economy and a range of other actors such as
governments, workers, regulatory bodies, institutions and consumers.

GLOBAL PRODUCTION NETWORKS

Related to these arguments about the way in which TNCs organize

globalized production is the concept of the global production network
(GPN). This is a distinctive concept within economic geography that
has sought to overcome some of the rather simplistic ways other
social science subjects (and economics in particular) understand
production in today’s complex global geo-economy. The key issue is
that national economies ‘can no longer be said to contain production’
inasmuch as many manufactured goods ‘get made’ in multiple places.
A product such as a car or even a laptop computer, for example, is
likely to have many different components made by different firms
at production facilities in many different countries around the
globe. Components get shipped from one factory to another, and
to make matters even more complicated, other aspects of production –
such as design – might take place in yet another set of locations. This
makes the labels ‘Made in the US’ and ‘Made in China’ both mis-
leading and quite often inaccurate. It also means that it is increasingly
difficult to see production as a process that occurs in one given
place at a given time. The concept of the GPN therefore aims to
provide a better way of understanding the multiple relationships
 GLOBALIZATION 41

between different firms that are involved in making something. It

represents a development of the older idea of a ‘global commodity
or value chain’, which aimed to capture the way a good or service
was made in a sequence with value being added at each stage of the
process. GPNs are bigger, more complex networks of many global
value chains, and have at least three dimensions that concern geo-
graphers: their governance (see above), their spatiality (i.e. how they
are geographically distributed) and what is called their territorial
embeddedness (the way they are grounded in political and other
institutions in specific places).
All GPNs have to operate across a range of scales – the local
places where factories are situated, nation-states that have govern-
ments, and global markets where they eventually have to sell products
across a world with much social and cultural diversity. The important
thing to realize, therefore, is that although these are production
networks, the consumption of their products is also a key factor
because GPNs are ultimately driven by ‘the necessity, willingness
and ability of customers to acquire and consume products, and to
continue doing so’ (after Dicken 2011).

GLOBAL TRADE

Trade in the world economy refers simply to the buying and selling
of goods and services between actors (individuals, firms, organizations)
in different places. As the world economy has become globalized,
total trade has grown enormously but trade benefits some localities
and not others depending on the nature of their economies. Whilst
growth in total world trade stalled during the 2007–9 economic
downturn, the long-term trend has been one of enormous expan-
sion. To get some idea of this, in 2008, total world trade measured
in terms of goods exported from one country to another amounted
to US$15.8 trillion. In the same year, exports of commercial ser-
vices was worth US$3.7 trillion. Human geographers have long
pointed to the unevenness of patterns of trade. Much international
trade is concentrated between the wealthier countries in the global
economy. However, in today’s world this is changing fairly rapidly.
In the last decade, developing countries such as China and India
have experienced huge trade growth, with China’s trade surplus
becoming an increasing source of tension in international politics.
42 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Another issue however that human geography is concerned with is

how globalization processes have made understanding the idea of trade
much harder. The reason is simple: patterns of trade have become
more complex and what we might count as ‘trade’ more difficult to
measure. The conventional way was to measure trade at the national
level with nation-states counting how many goods and services they
exported and imported. However, globalization processes have com-
plicated this in a number of ways. For one thing, a growing proportion
of world trade is different parts of the same large transnational firm
‘trading’ with each other – this undermines the widely held
assumption that trade as an activity comes to an end with the con-
sumption of a good or a service. Another issue is the nature of what
is traded, with not only services but also new digitized products (such
as software, music, film) hard to measure because they are sold and
bought in different parts of the global economy.
Human geography is not, however, concerned just with uneven
economic patterns of trade. Political geographers are also interested
in ideologies that underpin the free trade along with the issue of
trade justice, along with the political movements that have
emerged fighting to make trade across the global economy ‘fairer’.
The major focus has been the inequalities between the rich countries
of the global North and developing countries in the global
South. The poorer countries are often exporters of raw materials
and basic agricultural commodities such as tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa
and cotton. What is more, much of this production comes from
small farmers who rely on one or two crops for their livelihood.
Central to this political geography of trade is the way that large
TNCs have used their market power to force down prices.
Campaigns by charities such as Oxfam and other groups, such as the
Jubilee Debt Campaign, have targeted this power, trying to make
sure small farmers in poor countries receive a fair price. Such fair
trade initiatives are therefore about changing the nature of markets
so that they deliver better terms to producers in poor countries

GLOBAL FINANCE

Finance refers to the trade and circulation of many different types of

money and financial products. In today’s world, both take many
different forms. Most money or ‘capital’ in the global economy
 GLOBALIZATION 43

exists not as cash but in the abstract as bank loans, mortgages or

government bonds. Money fulfils five main functions in any economy:
it is the means by which economic things are accounted for (a unit of
account); the thing by which the value of everything else is measured
in terms of (a ‘measure of value’); it stores this value; it provides a
way of exchanging goods and services (termed a medium for
exchange), and it is a way of paying for things (a means of payment).
Much analysis of money and finance is of course carried out by
economists and those in other social science disciplines. However
(economic) geographers are critical of much of this because they
would say it ignored the geographies of money and finance that lie
behind what is often called the ‘global financial system’.
Geography then takes a more wide-ranging view of finance than
other social sciences. Several strands are evident. One is a concern
for the social, cultural and political aspects of finance with eco-
nomic geographers developing a body of work that has looked at
how money and finance have become increasingly dominant since
the 1980s, as more people work in these industries in many
economies, and popular and media attention becomes more focused
on finance. Think of films such as Wall Street (made in 1987 with a
sequel in 2010), or the media fury around investment bankers’ salaries
in America and Europe after the financial crisis of 2007–9 (see box).
Another concern of geographers working on finance has been the
relationship between (local) places and the global financial system.
Central to the current focus of human geographers’ interest in
finance, however, is the globalization of money and, in particular, the
emergence of a globalized financial system. What this means in essence
is the way that markets for money (which come in many forms in
today’s world) have become international, and no longer focused on
national economies. Since the 1980s, for example, it has become
possible for banks and other financial firms to buy and sell many more
different currencies, shares and other financial products in an interna-
tional marketplace with national governments no longer restricted as
to how much of their currency (or another country’s) can move in
and out of their borders. This has been greatly helped by a range of
new information and communication technologies (ICT). Where,
even in the late 1970s, traders in the City of London or a stock
exchange did their financial business face to face in a large hall using
slips of paper, now such deals are all done electronically and online.
44 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Geographers have been particularly interested in how finance has

extended its influence to every corner of the globe through this
integration, and in how more and more economic activity is bound
up with financial relationships that extend across the globe. Much
attention has of course been focused on the financial markets that trade
24 hours a day across a network of global cities such as Tokyo, New
York, London and Hong Kong. However, equally important for geo-
graphers is how the besuited financiers on Wall Street or in the Bund in
Shanghai are investing in every corner of the globe, integrating rural
societies from the interior states of China to the rainforest regions of
Brazil into the global capitalist system. Geographers are thus interested
in the uneven way is which finance is penetrating the lives of everyone
on the planet. This financialization process is not however, always
considered to be a positive development, with the ongoing integration
and growing power of the global financial system argued by some to be
creating greater instability and risk in an increasingly interdependent
global economy (see box on the 2007–9 financial crisis).

DEBT

One of the most important aspects of the global financial system is

debt. What money is owed by whom to whom across the planet has a
complicated geography, and the implications of the historical and
future development of this geography are the subject of much the-
orizing and analysis by geographers. Debt of course comes in many
more forms than the kinds you may experience in daily life – credit
cards, overdrafts or mortgages to buy a house. Debt in the world
financial system takes the form of a whole array of financial pro-
ducts that banks and other institutions trade in the markets. These
include government and company debt (bonds), different kinds of
bank loans, shares, as well as a whole array of more complex forms
known as ‘derivatives’. For geographers, however, what is
important is not so much the technical aspect of the operation of
these debt markets (which might interest economists) but rather the
way in which debt has affected different people’s lives differently across
the globe. This happens at a range of scales. For individuals, debt is
significant because it shapes the opportunities and constraints they
experience in life. If people are heavily indebted they may be
unable to raise their living standards, have a home to live in or, in
 GLOBALIZATION 45

many parts of the world, educate their children. However, the

geography of national debt (sometimes called ‘sovereign debt’) is
also important. If nation-states borrow too much, they end up
cutting jobs and public services, which can hinder a country’s
longer-term prospects for economic growth, as well as negatively
impacting on the populations that live there. In this respect, devel-
opment geographers have examined in depth the consequences of
events like the so-called 1980s ‘debt crisis’ when many developing
countries were unable to continue to pay back their debts to banks
in the developed world. The governments of countries such as
Mexico then had to impose huge cuts in their own domestic
expenditure, not only leading to hardship among their citizens but
also arguably restricting economic growth for many years afterwards.
More recently of course in the aftermath of the global economic
downturn from 2007, many developed economies – including the
US and European states – have struggled with very high levels of
sovereign debt.
However, economic geographers have also been concerned with
the wider implications of too much debt for the global economy as a
whole. The geographer David Harvey, for example, has argued that
the increasing power of integrated financial capitalism represents a
potentially catastrophic threat to the global economy (Harvey
2011). Debt is a central aspect of this, as too much borrowing leads
to financial crises that are no longer restricted to one country or
region but are transmitted across the globe through financial markets.

THE 2007–9 GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS AND ITS

AFTERMATH
In 2007, global financial markets experienced a crisis that led to the
collapse of several of the world’s leading investment banks as well as
many smaller banks in the global North. The crisis was very much a
geographical phenomenon, beginning in North America but quickly
spreading to Europe and parts of Asia. In many countries, national
governments had to step in and rescue banks that were dangerously
close to bankruptcy. A severe global recession followed. Economic
geographers have been concerned to understand how this process of
spreading is related to the highly globalized nature of global finance
in the world today.
46 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

The cause of the crisis was excessive lending by banks, particularly

in property markets (i.e. mortgages), along with new forms of derivatives
that allowed these debts to be turned into commodities traded
through the global financial system. It began in the US, where banks
had lent large amounts of money to homeowners who increasingly
could not afford to repay the debt and whose property was not worth
the amount of money owed. The people with the mortgages stopped
paying (known as defaulting), and it became clear that the mortgages
themselves would not be repaid. Banks across the globe that held large
amounts of these mortgages on their books (or the derivatives related
to them) had suddenly lost enormous amounts of money. Many
posted huge losses (Citibank), while others went bankrupt altogether
(the US banks, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns). Subsequently, the
crisis spread as similar problems with the ownership of overvalued
debts (‘bad debts’) emerged in lending to other regions of the world –
for example, the property markets of Ireland, the UK and Spain.
In many countries, national governments decided that some of
their largest banks could not be allowed to go bankrupt as it might
lead to the full-scale collapse of national financial systems. In the UK,
the government in effect bought (or nationalized) three banks
(Northern Rock, Halifax and Royal Bank of Scotland) in 2007–8.
However, the level of debt taken on by many European countries has
continued to create severe problems since that time. In particular, the
high levels of sovereign debt taken on by Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain
and Portugal has threatened their membership and even the continued
existence of the EU’s single currency – the euro. In 2010 and 2011,
these national governments continued to need significant loans and
support from the European Central Bank and the International
Monetary Fund to remain within the single currency system.

SUMMARY
In this chapter we have considered:

 Human geographers’ extensive engagement with theoretical

debates about the nature and significance of globalization in
today’s world;
 GLOBALIZATION 47

 How conceptual debates about globalization are intrinsically

geographical in their being grounded in space, time, and place;
 The way in which human geography sees human society and
economies as being systemic in nature, particularly in relation to
the emergence and ongoing development of a globalized capitalist
geo-economy;
 What is meant by the concept of ‘geopolitics’, and how human
geography as a subject has always been concerned with the
relationship between politics and territory of governance;
 The nature of global production networks, global trade and the
role of an increasingly globalized financial system.

FURTHER READING
Murray, W. (2006) Geographies of Globalization. London: Routledge.
Provides a distinctly geographical approach to an understanding of globalization,
relating the different aspects of the globalization debate to theoretical themes
within geographical thinking.

Dicken, P. (2011) Global Shift [6th edition]. London: Sage.

Remains the definitive text by an economic geographer on the nature of the
global geo-economy. It is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more
about global production networks and the nature of transnational firms in all
industries.

WEB RESOURCES
The Global Policy Forum has a wide range of discussion on current debates
about globalization: www.globalpolicy.org
Look at the companion site to Peter Dicken’s book: www.uk.sagepub.com/
dicken6
 3

DEVELOPMENT AND
ENVIRONMENT

This chapter considers what is meant by the idea of ‘development’

and how geographers have engaged with the concept. It then
moves on to examine the related concept of ‘environment’, paying
particular attention to what environmental problems might be and
the nature of environmental politics.

DEVELOPMENT
The concept of development is controversial, and there is much
disagreement within and beyond human geography as to what it
means, whether it is possible and ultimately whether it is beneficial.
In essence it is based on the (widely held) view that certain human
societies on planet Earth are more advanced in some way (economic-
ally, technologically or even politically) than others. If every country
on Earth were considered to be equally advanced, then by definition
there would be no need for development. The idea therefore implies
some kind of progressive change by which less advanced societies
(understood as being within nation-states these days) develop, although
there is no universally accepted definition. The word ‘development’
became used as it is today from the mid-20th century in the after-
math of the Second World War. In a famous speech in 1949, the
then US President Truman said that the ‘underdeveloped’ world
 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT 49

was both a ‘handicap and threat to themselves and the more pros-
perous areas’. The answer was ‘modern scientific and technical
knowledge’ to tackle the impoverishment of these areas of the word.
Development was thus about the modernization and economic progress
of countries, as measured by increases in the total output of the
economies (normally measured using Gross Domestic Product
or GDP). The goal was for the poor countries of the ‘Third World’,
as they became known, to ‘catch-up’ with the more advanced and
wealthier economies of the capitalist western First World, and to a
lesser extent of the communist Second World (these geographical
categorizations of the world were discussed in Chapter 2). A strong
element to this was the argument that the more developed world
needed to intervene and direct the development of poorer countries
in order for them to modernize themselves to permit economic
growth. This perspective on development became known as the
‘modernization school’.
However, by the 1970s, critiques of this idea of development had
appeared. For one thing, some critics argued, it was too narrow an
idea, focused only on economic factors. It was argued that the
concept needed to include a range of different kinds of measure of
development, including such factors as the life expectancy of people in
a country and how well they were educated. Yet more important was
another challenge from development thinkers in the so-called ‘less
developed countries’. Using Marxist ideas, the Latin American
‘dependency school’ argued that approaches to development based
on capitalism were keeping the poor countries poor, rather than
leading to economic growth. These thinkers influenced the world
systems theories we met in Chapter 2, and argued that developing
countries need to ‘uncouple’ themselves from the world capitalist
economy if they wished to develop, rather than engaging in greater
integration. The concept of development thus quickly became
embroiled in political and ideological discussions about whether the
global economic system (increasingly dominated by capitalism)
could reduce poverty and produce progressive change in the poorer
regions of the world.
Human geographers were of course very much interested in the
intrinsically spatial debates about the nature, effectiveness and
ideological basis of development. It should be apparent in light of
the earlier discussion of globalization (see Chapter 2) that the two
50 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

phenomena are entwined. Indeed, one of the most important con-

tributions of geographers is to argue that it is impossible to talk about
these processes in isolation. Since the late 1980s, ‘development
geography’ has been very much at the centre of more recent con-
ceptual debates about the very idea of ‘development’. At the same
time, the modernizing view of development was replaced by an
increasingly dominant set of ideas known as ‘neoliberalism’, which saw
an integrated free market global capitalist economy as the pathway to
achieving wealth and human progress. Yet the shift towards a broad
neoliberal consensus among governments and the institutions of
development (notably the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund) had other effects. One important aspect of this
ideology was an increasing removal of government intervention in
economies and societies, based on doubt that states could achieve
effective development. Instead neoliberal ideas suggested that private
investors and firms represented the best actors to maximize welfare
in global society. This replaced the idea that states and other orga-
nizations needed to lead in developing the poorer regions of the
world, with an approach based on foreign investment, firms and the
market. In that sense, neoliberal economic globalization was argued
to be the way to achieve development.
In the last decades of the 20th century, however, the debate
about how development should be achieved became ever fiercer. A
range of thinkers (largely from the global South) began to argue
that the whole project of modern development was essentially a
flawed activity designed to reinforce and maintain the wealth,
power and advantage enjoyed by the richer countries. By the
1980s, neoliberal economic globalization was seen as the manifes-
tation of this project, and thus the target for resistance. Before we
consider this resistance in terms of events and practices, however,
we first need to consider the concept that emerged from this:
post-development.

POST-DEVELOPMENT

Since the 1980s, a range of thinkers within development studies and

development geography have questioned ‘the very idea of devel-
opment itself’. They argue that (big ‘D’) Development corresponds
to both a concept and practice that originates and is based on the
 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT 51

interests of the historically rich and powerful countries of the global

North. A key thinker in this ‘post-development’ perspective is
Arturo Escobar, who argues that the post-Second World War view
of modernizing development has ‘progressively turned into a
nightmare’ that has ‘failed’. Writing in the mid-1990s, he argued
that President Truman’s project had not only failed in alleviating
poverty, but in fact it had created a particular way of both representing
the poorer parts of the world and a prescription for how to solve
this perceived problem (Escobar 1995). In particular, modern devel-
opment understood the global South to be full of poverty, disease
and ignorance. Its solution was large government-led projects
(building roads, dams, hospitals and so on) that were implemented
by Western ‘experts’ and hardly involved the local people who they
were meant to help. For Escobar, such projects were ill-conceived,
bad for local communities and for the environment. Modernizing
development was, therefore, a problem in itself.
In making such arguments, Escobar was drawing on the philo-
sophical basis of a wider shift in the social sciences known as the ‘cul-
tural turn’ that was discussed in the Introduction. In essence, the
questioning of all ‘big’ theories of the world by postmodern and post-
structuralist thinking was brought to bear on ideas about develop-
ment. Escobar and others also made use of the work of the French
thinker Michel Foucault to uncover how the concept of develop-
ment was laden with a particular set of power relationships and
knowledge. Development theories with a capital ‘D’ were, for much
of the 20th century, about the views of rich people in the global
North about what ought to be done about the poor of the global South
rather than whether the economic system (that is, capitalism) that
had produced a wealthy global North needed to change. Geographers
have become increasingly interested in the latter idea, which is some-
times referred to as ‘little d’ development, concerned with the
geographically uneven and contradictory nature of global capitalism.
This brings us back to our earlier discussion of debates about
globalization, which have come to dominate more recent debates
within development geography. Since the 1990s, the old geographical
categories used by development thinkers have become less relevant –
the First, Second and Third Worlds, for example. Some poor
countries have achieved significant economic growth, and globali-
zation increasingly means that wealth and poverty co-exist beneath
52 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

the scale of nation-states. Perhaps most significant, however, is how

ideas about whether both development and globalization are a good
or bad thing have become entwined. The anti-globalization move-
ment originated in countries of the global South such as Mexico in the
1990s, and the ideological conflicts between neoliberal economic
globalization and these resistance movements are in essence the central
questions that occupy ongoing debates in the ‘post-development era’.
We therefore need to consider resistance in more depth.

RESISTANCE

The critiques of development that have evolved over the last 60 years
have led to an array of resistance movements across the globe. Human
geographers are interested in the geographies of these spaces of resistance
and in particular the relationship between resistance movements at dif-
ferent scales in a globalizing world. In that sense, the Marxist critiques of
modernization theory that emerged in the 1970s represent an early
form of resistance to development that has since developed into mul-
tiple ideas and activities. Today it is not possible to understand resis-
tance to development without of course also discussing resistance to
globalization. We can, however, offer a brief history of this resistance.
While people did criticize development in the 1960s and 1970s, it
was not until the 1980s and the arrival of neoliberalism that resistance
appeared in the form of anti-development movements and popular
protests in the less developed world. A key moment in this is the Latin
American debt crisis in the early 1980s, when governments across the
global South cut public services heavily. Many Latin American coun-
tries had very little economic growth during the rest of the 1980s, and
their populations became increasingly dissatisfied. In some places this
led to civil war (Nicaragua) or Marxist-inspired guerrilla resis-
tance movements (Colombia, Peru). In the 1990s, however, new
forms of popular resistance also appeared. The most famous is the
Zapatista movement in the southern (poor) part of Mexico that
declared (more symbolic than real) war on the Mexican government
in 1993, saying that its (neoliberal) economic policies were doing
nothing for the poorest Mexicans. The Zapatistas are famous
because they cleverly made use of the internet to turn their campaign
into a global one, and they are widely credited with representing the
foundation of the global so-called anti-globalization movement.
 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT 53

In this way, by the late 1990s, resistance to development within

specific countries had itself become a globalized phenomenon. The
anti-globalization movement protested against the broad consensus
of neoliberal economic policies that were accepted across the globe.
The focus for protests were meetings of world leaders at summits
(the G8 meeting in Seattle in 1999, for instance) and trade nego-
tiations. This anti-globalization movement incorporated a wider
range of what are known as ‘grassroots’ resistance movements from
the global North and global South, and also led to a number of off-
shoot movements like the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which were
aimed at getting the rich countries of the global North to write off
the debts of the poorer ones. These campaigns have become
increasingly popular in nature with famous pop stars and other media
figures fronting these campaigns. For example, the lead singer of U2,
Bono, was heavily involved in the debt write-off campaign.
Other resistance movements have targeted the activities of trans-
national corporations, which have increasingly been criticized for
exploiting both the people and natural environments of countries in
the global South. Examples of such movements include the ‘No
Logo’ campaign (see box) which highlighted the use of low-paid
child and ‘sweatshop’ labour by Western high street retailers to
make clothes sold in the rich countries of the North. In this sense,
in the 21st century, resistance to development is bound up with a global
resistance movement that contests the ability of the global capitalist
economy and dominant (neoliberal) ideologies to deliver greater wel-
fare to everyone on the planet. It has also been a global political and
cultural phenomenon, existing across the internet and increasingly
making use of new social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

THE ‘NO LOGO’ CAMPAIGN

One of the best-known campaigns aimed at resisting neoliberal eco-
nomic globalization in Western countries was the ‘No Logo’ cam-
paign. Building on an internet-based campaign, the Canadian
journalist Naomi Klein published a book with this title in 2000. Its
major aim was to point to the negative effects of global brands and
the transnational corporations that owned them. Klein argued that
famous high street brands were supported by unfair and unjust
labour condition in the global South, and that transnational firms
54 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

produced many Western branded consumers goods (for example,

clothing and footwear) under exploitative conditions in the
global South. Central to this is the argument that workers producing
goods were paid very low wages while substantial profits were
made by TNCs owning the brands. Klein also attacked the advertising
and marketing strategies of these firms, and in particular the way they
targeted young people as consumers of the goods (Klein 2000).
Human geographers have been interested in these ideas as they
try to understand the nature of globalization and the politics that
surrounds today’s global economy; Klein’s argument shares common
ground with the way political geographers have thought about the
development of new social movements. However, geographical
thinking also presents some critical perspectives on the arguments
upon which ‘No Logo’ is based. Foremost is perhaps the simplistic
way in which the ‘No Logo’ campaign presents cultural globalization,
and in many ways overstates the power that transnational firms and
advertisers have. In thinking about resistance to globalization, human
geographers have argued that the interaction between global branding
and local cultures is more complex, and that brands have different
cultural meanings and values in different regions of the world.

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

As an interdisciplinary social science, human geography finds itself
at the centre of debates about the environment. The subject is
perhaps uniquely positioned to address 21st-century environmental
issues because it brings together economic, political and socio-cul-
tural perspectives to bear, enabling discussion of the many factors
that need to be considered when attempting to understand the
environment. A further advantage of course is that the wider dis-
cipline of geography spans both the social and the natural sciences,
and no issue blurs the boundaries between human and physical
geographers like the global environment.

ENVIRONMENT AND NATURE

Environment is another of the wide-ranging concepts that gets used

in all kinds of sloppy ways by everyone, let alone human
 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT 55

geographers and other social scientists. In a literal sense, it is a catch-

all term for all the surrounding conditions that influence human
beings and the societies in which they live. If you were to live on a
space station, then this is a type of environment, but in reality the
word is used to refer to the places around us here on Earth. In other
words, it is shorthand for the Earth’s environment. This obviously
includes places that other living creatures apart from humans inhabit,
whether this is the remote deserts or deep oceans. The environment
encompasses every aspect of these places, whether the living
organisms in a place or the non-living elements that it comprises
including earth, air and water.
The history of human geography has involved several different
ways of thinking about the environment. In the early 20th century,
the subject was preoccupied with the now discredited idea of envir-
onmental determinism. This viewpoint suggested that the environ-
ment imposed tight conditions and boundaries on the nature of
human activity in any given place on Earth and produced certain
patterns of behaviour. The implication was that societies in the
polar regions, for example, evolved very differently from those on
islands in the middle of the ocean or in the tropical regions. Since
these early theories of the interaction between human societies and
their environment, human geography has developed a number of
successive ideas including human determinism (where people are able
to completely dominate the environment in which they live) and
environmental possibilism (where the environment shapes the
opportunities that are available to human societies). It is the last of
these perspectives that has increasingly dominated the subject since the
last decades of the 20th century, but at least equally important is a
philosophical shift in how human geographers view the whole idea of
the environment, again linked to the shift associated with the cul-
tural turn.
At the heart of this is a conceptual problem that has occupied
several social science subjects, not just human geography, neatly
encapsulated in the familiar phrase ‘the natural environment’. This
may seem strange in that, in a commonsense way, most people
know what they mean when they think of ‘nature’. You might
imagine rainforests, jungles, mountain ranges or tropical reefs to be
natural and clearly distinct from human landscapes like cities.
However, human geographers have shown how ‘nature’ and
56 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

‘human society’ have blurred boundaries, and that everyday ideas of

there being a clear distinction between nature (non-human living
and non-living things) and society (human phenomena) is proble-
matic. Increasingly the separation of the two is argued to be
‘socially constructed’. This does not mean there is no such thing as
‘nature’, but rather that it does not exist outside our understandings
and representation of the non-human world. Moreover, many
things that are regarded as ‘natural’ (that is, separate from human
interference) are in fact the product of a very long period of inter-
action with human society. Domesticated plants and animals (sheep,
pigs, tomatoes, wheat) that humans have cultivated and adapted
over thousands of years are very good examples of this.
Environmental geographers have thus in recent times become
increasingly interested in exploring the implications of this insight
in relation to how, for example, different environments are valued
by different groups in society and how power relations shape what
is understood to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ changes to the environment.
This means that human geography has significant insights to offer
on the nature of environmental problems, to which we now turn.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

Human geography’s central concern for the interaction between

humans and their environment means that the subject is very much
about the causes, nature of and potential solutions to environmental
problems. What should be clear from the discussion of the idea of
‘environment’ above, however, is that human geography has
become very concerned in its environmental possibilism phase with
the power relations that are bound up with the idea. When applied
to environmental problems, the insights of the cultural turn have
led geographers to focus on the underlying assumptions that define
a form of environmental change as either a problem or not.
Changes to the environment are happening all the time, and have
been throughout the history of the Earth. Many are influenced by
humans, some are not, but they can only become a problem if
represented as such by society. The idea that an environmental change
corresponds to a problem therefore implies environmental degrad-
ation, but any measure of ‘degradation’ is based on a pre-existing
human view of what a given environment should be like.
 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT 57

Also important to human geographers is the scale at which

environmental problems are understood to exist and are addressed
(or not). It is common to talk of ‘global’ environmental problems,
but geographers are quick to point out that no environmental
change impacts uniformly everywhere equally on Earth. Climate
change may be a global problem, but different places will experi-
ence the consequence of this change to different degrees. This is as
much true whether change occurs to the Earth’s surface or atmo-
sphere, or to its ecosystem. At the regional and local scales, the
understanding of and response to natural environmental disasters is
also illustrative of this. The then US President George W. Bush was
heavily criticized for his response to Hurricane Katrina striking the
city of New Orleans in 2005. While the hurricane itself was a
‘natural’ phenomenon, some scientists argued that such a strong
hurricane was related to human-induced climate change. At the
city level, many people died in a district where flood defences failed
and this provoked a vigorous debate about whether the city and federal
governments had invested enough money in adequate flood protection.
The environmental catastrophe that Hurricane Katrina produced was
consequently a heavily politicized event. Human geographers thus
see environmental problems as inseparable from the politics that sur-
round the environment, and in today’s world much of this politics also
has a ‘global’ dimension. Before we come to this topic, however, we
need to consider a concept that aims to offer a long-term way of
tackling environmental problems – sustainable development.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY

The need for there to be some kind of sustainable development is

based on the idea that the Earth’s resources are finite and that cur-
rent forms of human activity cannot continue depleting them irre-
versibly. If everyone on Earth continues to act in their own self-
interest, the shared resource it represents will be depleted in a way
that is against everyone’s long-term interest (this is known as ‘the
tragedy of the commons’). Unsustainable human activity therefore
needs to be replaced by sustainable development, the most widely
used definition of which comes from the UN’s Brundtland
Commission of 1987, which defined it as ‘development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
58 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

generations to meet their own needs’. However, considerable debate

exists regarding this definition within and beyond geography.
Before the Brundtland Commission, environmental thinking tended
to see the relationship between economic growth and the environ-
ment as oppositional – growth would be ‘bad’ for the environment.
Central to this is what is known as a ‘deep green’ approach to
development, founded on ecology. In essence, the ‘deep green’
view of development rejects the idea that the Earth’s environment
can be maintained without limiting economic growth. One of the
most well-known proponents of this is the writer James Lovelock
who proposed his ‘Gaia’ idea in the 1960s – that the Earth is like a
living organism and needs to be maintained in good health.
Lovelock and other deep green thinkers generally take their ideas
from ecology and theories of how ecosystems are maintained or are
damaged. Deep green arguments therefore advocate a dramatic
change in the way we all live on Earth, suggesting people should
make and consume less, produce less waste, travel less and be aware
of the impact on the environment in everyday life. In contrast, the
Brundtland Commission had a very different view: that growth and
the environment could complement each other. This perspective sees
sustainable development as ecological modernization and, since the
1980s, has become the dominant way in which governments and
international institutions such as the UN and World Bank refer to the
idea. Sustainable development from this perspective is about main-
taining an environment that serves the economic needs of the
future, rather than preserving or protecting existing environments
(whether that is species such as the blue whale or habitats such as the
Amazon rainforest) for their own sake. The sustainability imagined in
ecological modernization therefore does not necessarily mean sustaining
an environment that has not been changed (or arguably degraded).
A consequence of this is that ‘mainstream’ sustainable development
cast as ecological modernization has forced many radical envir-
onmentalists to disown the concept. Critics doubt above all that ecolo-
gical modernization is producing or is in future likely to produce ‘truly’
sustainable development. They point to continuing (and accelerat-
ing) environmental degradation across the globe, as well as to a
wide range of activities perpetrated by governments, TNCs and
other actors, that are really unsustainable. This critique suggests that
the early 21st century global economy continues to remained
 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT 59

focused on growth at the expense of the environment and that as it

grows, an ever-larger proportion of the Earth’s natural resources are
being exploited. Human and environmental geography today
therefore has a central interest in evaluating these competing claims
about sustainability. They have also equally become interested in the
global politics that surrounds the question of sustainable development.

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

The debate about whether (and how) sustainable development can

be achieved at the planetary scale is not just an academic question,
but has become a central aspect of international politics.
International political concern about the environment began to
take shape in the 1950s and 1960s, but the most important moment
was the UN summit held in 1972 in Stockholm, Sweden. The
Stockholm conference achieved little in terms of actual international
agreements or laws, but what it did do was push environmental issues
onto the international political agenda. Before that point, meetings
of world leaders rarely addressed environmental issues. During the
1970s and 1980s, the environment became an increasingly pressing
political issue and countries began to negotiate and come to agree-
ments, as well as take action. In part politicians in the global North
were responding to the growing concern about the environment
among the populations they represented, but also a string of envir-
onmental problems that crossed international borders were identi-
fied. Examples include the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer by
chemicals commonly used by industry and in consumer goods
(chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs) and the political response that was
needed across Europe and beyond to the Chernobyl nuclear acci-
dent when a Soviet (Russian) nuclear power station blew up send-
ing radiation over a huge area in 1986.
However, since the 1990s, global environmental politics has
moved from being a side issue at meetings of world leaders to one
of the most important topics. What has produced this change of
course was not the 1987 Brundtland Report, or even the Rio
‘Earth Summit’ in 1992 (although both were important), but a
growing body of scientific evidence that human beings are causing
a warming of the planet. Global warming has in that sense created an
urgent need for political institutions to come to formal agreements
60 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

that straddle the globe in order to tackle the problem. The first
major step in this direction was the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, where a
number of wealthier countries signed up to an agreement to reduce
emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
However, since the late 1990s, the scientific evidence has shown
this to be far from sufficient, and there have been successive meet-
ings of world leaders negotiating further controls of emissions. This
has been a major test of whether or not the international political
system has the ability to effectively agree on and address global
environmental problems. To date, most commentators would agree
that these political attempts to tackle human-caused climate change
have met with only limited success.
Human geography is especially interested in what can be termed
the ‘re-scaling’ of environmental politics to the global level that has
occurred in the last 50 years or so. As with other aspects of political
globalization, environmental politics in today’s world is practised
through a large and growing number of actors that exist at many
different scales. And, as has already been mentioned, the ‘global-ness’
of the environment is not unproblematic. The nature of
global environmental politics is all about the impacts of current or future
environmental changes, such as human-caused climate change, on
many different specific places across the planet, where different groups
of people and different institutions (nation-states or super-states such
as the EU) have interests. The strength of human geography over other
subjects in understanding the politics of the global environment lies in
its capacity to theorize how all these multiple scales interrelate to shape
the actions, agreements and forms of governance that emerge (or fail to).

SUMMARY
In this chapter we have considered:

 What is meant by the concepts of ‘development’, ‘post-

development’ and debates from a political geographic perspective
on different forms of resistance to development that have emerged;
 How human geographers have engaged with debates about the
global environment, particularly in relation to the utility of a geo-
graphical approach to understanding what a global environmental
problem is and how it may be tackled;
 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT 61

 Debates about what ‘sustainable development’ means and how

human geography offers a strong approach for understanding the
nature of global environmental politics in the 21st century.

FURTHER READING
Adams, W. (2008) Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the
Developing World [3rd edition]. London: Routledge.
Represents one of the most comprehensive accounts by a geographer on the
issues surrounding sustainable development.

Castree, N. (2007) Nature – Key Ideas in Geography. London: Routledge.

Gives a short and focused account of the major approaches to nature within
human geographic thought.

Painter, J. and Jeffrey, A. (2010) Political Geography: An Introduction on Space and

Power. London: Sage.
Of the many political geography textbooks, this book is particularly successful
at applying recent conceptual debates within human geography to current case
studies.

Willis, K. (2011) Theories and Practices of Development [2nd edition]. London:

Routledge.
This book provides comprehensive coverage of development geography.

WEB RESOURCES
The UK government’s supported organization aimed at promoting sustainable
development is a good place to get an idea of how this issue shapes the
policy of nation-states: www.sd-commission.org.uk
The World Bank’s You Think! site is a basic guide to the major issues of devel-
opment: http://youthink.worldbank.org. When you are done with that, try
the US-based think-thank Center for Social Development site www.cgdev.org
 4

STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE

This chapter examines the way human geographers have understood

the interrelated evolution of states, nations and nationalism. It
considers how the modern nation-states that cover the planet today
are the consequence of a long and complicated interaction between
history, political struggle, different cultures and shared identities – all
of which are strongly influenced by geographical factors. The chapter
then moves on to consider the related issue of how geographers
understand the difficult concept of ‘culture’ more generally, paying
particular attention to its relationship to place and how we consume
space. This leads neatly on to a discussion of human geographers’
arguments about the nature of landscape.

STATES AND NATIONALISM

One of the commonest confusions in political geography comes
with the use of concepts of ‘state’ and ‘nation’. They are often
coupled together as ‘nation-state’, but in popular discussions and
the media you will often hear all three of these words used quite
interchangeably. They are of course all interrelated, but it is
important to understand the differences between their respective
definitions and their relationship to the phenomenon of
‘nationalism’.
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 63

STATES

The ‘state’ refers to any governing institution that has jurisdiction

over a piece of (land) territory on the Earth’s surface. A state is
therefore an institution that governs a community of people who
live in that piece of territory, usually involving some form of social
hierarchy with an elite group at the top of it. The idea of the state
is therefore fairly old, certainly dating back several thousand years.
In discussions of the founding ideas about what a state is and why
we need it, it is often the works of classical Greek philosophers such as
Aristotle and Plato that are referred to. The ancient Greek civilization
was composed of a range of ‘city-states’ that governed themselves
and an area of territory around them. Of course the Roman Empire
that followed corresponded to a much more geographically extensive
state-like institution (although the idea of an empire has some dis-
tinctive features). In more recent centuries, city-states existed and
small countries (kingdoms if you like) existed in a patchwork across
Western Europe. Think of the world Shakespeare describes in
many of his plays set in what is modern Italy. Plays such as Romeo
and Juliet take place in city-states where the ‘state’ corresponds to
the court of a duke or a local lord. Another good example is the
fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. These are essentially 19th-
century romanticized stories about a medieval European world of
small ‘kingdoms’ that formed a patchwork of small states across
Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and early modern
period. In our popular culture, all these ideas are mixed up, and of
course often sanitized in children’s stories; all those large castles with
towers and moats in central Europe were built that way because the
medieval world was a violent one where small states were often in a
state of conflict and war with each other.
The important historical change that led to the appearance of the
kinds of states that cover maps in today’s world came with the
development of modernity from the 16th and 17th centuries. This
term corresponds to a number of changes to society linked to the
re-emergence of science as an important form of knowledge along
with the spread of capitalism. A further aspect was the circulation of
many ideas dating back to antiquity, and in particular the writings
of Greek philosophers about what a state should be (a body that
represents and is answerable to its citizens based on democracy). This
64 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

challenged the right of European monarchs to rule. Such a process

took many centuries and is historically complex, but together these
changes produced the progressive transformation of the medieval
monarchy-based states into modern nation-states. Like historians, his-
torical geographers are interested in the diversity of ways in which
this transformation occurred, but the important outcome was the
major shift in how collective identities of people changed.
States therefore are the political institutions that control a certain
piece of territory. Even at the beginning of the 20th century,
imperial states with borders that were not clearly defined governed
much of the Earth’s land surface. Examples include the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, which covered much of central Europe, and the
Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean (what is now Turkey),
across the Middle East to Iran and Iraq, as well as parts of Russia and
the Chinese Ch’ing Empire. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had some
characteristics in common with modern nation-states, but the others
were not defined by the shared idea of being a nation. Rather, different
structures and ideas explain why these empires held together, including
religion and ethnic or linguistic commonalities.
This territorial control that states possess is encapsulated in the
idea of sovereignty. The use of the word, of course, has historical
roots in the power of kings and queens (‘sovereign’ monarchs) as the
heads of state. In the modern era, this power has shifted from being
that held by a monarch to the power of a state as an institution to
govern its territory. Sovereignty has, however, many different forms
and, importantly, does not necessarily have a close link with terri-
tory in history. In the medieval period, for example, the territories
of states were often ill-defined and the borders unclear. The English
‘state’ that Shakespeare’s Henry V talks about included patches of
what is now western France and other small areas of other European
territories. Sovereignty in this period was also shared with various
institutions including the Church and local lords, knights, dukes and
so on. Elsewhere in the pre-modern world, forms of political sover-
eignty were also complicated arrangements with loyalty to religious
leaders often being the primary factor in deciding who governed
whom and where. The point is that until the ideology of modern
nationalism developed in the 19th century, the relationship
between states, territory and sovereignty (that is, political power
and control) was complex and fluid. It was only when nationalist
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 65

ideology spread across the globe during the 20th century that the
nation-state became the dominant form.

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

The concept of a nation refers to a community of people who share

a common identity, based on some degree of cultural commonality;
it often (but certainly not always) entails a common language, and
some degree of common ethnic heritage. It is closely related to
nationalism, which in short is the ideology that has driven the
creation of modern nation-states and remains crucial to their con-
tinued existence. If the nation-state is the institutional form of states
in today’s world, then nationalism is the idea and value-system that
underpins those institutions. In seeking to understanding the com-
plex and varied relationship between nations, nationalism and
nation-states, human geographers have drawn heavily on the
widely, cited arguments of Benedict Anderson that were developed
in his 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism.
Anderson argues that nations are dynamic communities of shared
identity that must in essence involve some kind of spatial imagina-
tion. There are three (main) aspects to this imaging process. First,
nations are imagined as being ‘limited’ inasmuch as they must have
external boundaries beyond which other nations exist. Nationalism
as an ideology requires that there are other people out there who
are not part of your nation, and nations are defined as much by the
people who are not part of them as by those who are.
The second aspect to the way in which nations are imagined
brings us back to the idea of sovereignty. Nations have to be
sovereign, says Anderson, because the idea came out of that
historical period associated with the Enlightenment in the 17th and
18th centuries. The (first) French Revolution in 1789 was all
about destroying the legitimacy of kings and queens ‘appointed
by God’, and breaking free. The sovereign state is the emblem
of this freedom. Finally, nations are imagined as a community of
equals. No matter how much inequality and exploitation may go
on within nations, the idea is based around a common sense of
comradeship. People are loyal to nations and to their national
‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.
66 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

While other subjects such as history and politics have enormous

interest in nation-states, human geographers (and most particularly
political geographers) have a particular perspective since all three of
these dimensions to the imagined basis for nations have a very
strong link to territories and to particular places. Nation-states have
geographies which are mapped and (re)presented to the national
population. At school, everyone encounters this in the modern world
as atlases, and geography lessons that teach children in a nation-state
about its history and its geographical form. The important point is
that all of this is a very recent development. In the 19th and 20th
centuries, nationalism provided the basis for a series of practices that
in essence created the idea that nation-states should exist.
Nation-states thus rely on what have been termed ‘national
myths’ about the legitimacy and supposed naturalness of these
imagined communities. The examples are numerous, but consider
how every nation-state has a national flag, national monuments,
national museums and national public holidays. National myths
often perpetuate the idea that imagined communities are very old,
based on the idea that nations have a long history in a given place,
when in fact they are much more recent. Their goal is to generate
among populations strong feelings of belonging to the nation.
Whether that is English nationalists celebrating on St George’s Day
(St George being the patron saint of England from the early Middle
Ages) or Indian nationalists linking a Hindu national history to
the whole of the Indian subcontinent (see box), this represents the
tendency in nationalism to ‘reinvent the past’.

INDIAN NATIONALISM
The modern nation-state of India came into existence on 15 August
1947, after a long nationalist struggle against the British Empire in
the first half of the 20th century. This nationalist movement involved
several groups fighting for a unified nation-state covering the whole
subcontinent. Central to this was the role of Mahatma Gandhi who,
as a key member of the Indian Nationalist Congress (INC), led a
campaign for independence from the British empire. However, the
Indian nationalist imagination was not as coherent as Gandhi had
hoped, and the new country quickly divided in two along religious
lines between Hindu and Muslim. This ‘partition’ produced the new
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 67

nation-state of Pakistan, but also led to violence and the death of an

estimated million people (Chatterji 2007). Furthermore, even since
Partition Gandhi’s imagined community of ‘one India’ has always
been fractured and contested, with regional separatist groups fighting
for independent states in Jammu and Kashmir in the north-west.
Indian nationalism in the 21st century has several variants, with
Hindu nationalists imagining India as a Hindu-only nation in con-
trast to the secular vision of India as a mixed religious community of
multiple religions and ethnicities that has dominated for most of its
history. If you are interested in learning more, a great place to begin
is to read Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize-winning novel Midnight’s
Children (1981), which takes the history of India’s conflicting collective
identities since Independence as its central theme.

Often nationalists link a national history to a homeland territory,

and this represents one of the central tensions in the ideology and a
primary point of conflict. The reason is that quite often several
nationalisms make claims about the same piece of territory.
Consider the troubled and competing views of nationalism in Ireland,
or the horrific war that developed in the 1990s after the break-up of
Yugoslavia. Across the world similar disputes continue in a whole
range of places – Spain’s Basque region, the southern Russian
region of Chechnya, Tibet and other regions of north-west China.
These conflicts are driven by different views of whose nationalism
should lay claim to a given patch of territory.
Once you appreciate that nationalism is a modern ideology that
has not been around very long, a further important thing to realize
is that there are many different nationalisms and these are not
simply repeated versions of the kind of nationalism that appeared in
Western Europe in the 19th century. Political geographers have argued
that there is a tendency to see nationalisms as based on European (or to
some extent) American models, but in fact the ideology of nationalism
has been transformed and mutated as it has taken hold in other parts
of the world. For example, Asian nationalism is argued to have a
distinctive form and set of values that are as much to do with pre-
existing cultural ideas in many Asian countries as they are to do with
Western ideas imported by colonial or imperial powers. Human
68 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

geographers informed by a postcolonial perspective, and in the

aftermath of the cultural turn, are thus interested in how many
nationalisms correspond to complex hybrids that blend elements of
Western nationalism ideology with local qualities, meanings and
nuances that never existed in Europe. An example would be the
nature of Indian national identity and how it cannot be reduced to
a set of values imposed by the British or other European countries, but
rather reflect cultural, spiritual and social norms that are distinctive to
the many different ethnic and religious communities living across the
Indian subcontinent.
For human geographers, one of the key debates over the last
couple of decades has been the impact of globalization on nation-
states and nationalism. In Chapter 2, we saw that one of the major
arguments made about globalization is that nation-states are being
undermined or weakened by it. We can now add some more detail
to this discussion. The key point here to emphasize is that human
geography provides a sophisticated way of understanding why
nation-states are not only far from being dead but are unlikely to
disappear any time soon. There have never been more nation-states
than there are today, and in fact the planet-wide coverage of this
political territorial form of state is really only a (very) recent phen-
omenon. Dozens of new nation-states were born as recently as the
1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, that does
not mean that political globalization has not changed the capacity of
states to govern their territories, or that cultural globalization has
not created new dynamics in the ideological basis of nationalisms. It
has been argued that nation-states have been ‘hollowed out’ by
globalization, as their powers over the economy moves to local
governments, transnational firms and supranational organizations
such as the International Monetary Fund, but geographers also
point to the consolidation of nation-state powers in other ways
(they are still the major holders of power in attempts to govern or
regulate climate change or international trade). Similarly, while some
point to the rise of global or transnational cultures as phenomena that
potentially undermine the strong sense of belonging of populations
within nation-states, a geographical view suggests that some of these
international flows and cultural dynamics are not that new and that
many other forms of everyday practice continue to reproduce the
nation-state. Think of what happens when you arrive at an airport,
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 69

and all the paperwork and systems that states have concerning passports,
immigration and national regulations. It may be true that nation-states
in the 21st century are being constantly challenged by globalization, but
in many other ways they have become more established and per-
manent aspects of global society than ever before.

THE STATE AND THE ECONOMY

In today’s globalized world, states are far from in decline but have
evolved a complex set of relationships with other economic actors.
In the 1990s political scientists and others argued that nation-states
were ‘dead’ and ‘obsolete’ (Ohmae 1996), and that they had
become irrelevant in relation to a globalizing economy. Economic
and political geography have in a range of ways shown how this is
not the case, and how states remain crucially important actors in the
operation of the global economy. As the economic geographer
Peter Dicken argues, in the 21st century states still matter enor-
mously. Their role may have changed from in earlier decades, but
states remain at the centre of economic activity not at its margins.
Dicken and other geographers identify at least four ways in which
this is the case (Dicken 2011).
The first is around the issue of regulation. Economic activity does
not exist in a vacuum, and states are important regulators of what
goes on. Firms have to obey state laws, and states impose restrictions
on what they can and cannot do. Equally, states are central to the
regulation of markets themselves. This happens in all kinds of ways,
but in our capitalist world, states have the responsibility and power
to make sure that markets are ‘free’ and that individual actors do
not have the power to dominate them to their advantage (for
example, by trying to become monopolies that dominate an
industry or market). Likewise, states impose rules about what kinds
of goods and services can be provided, particularly in relation to
such issues as health and safety as well as banning certain kinds of
goods (for example, addictive drugs). Economic and political geo-
graphers, however, are interested in how in today’s globalized
economy, new kinds of states (‘super-states’) have joined with
nation-states to act as regulators.
A second aspect of the interaction between states and the economy
that geographers are interested in concerns the role that states play
70 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

as ‘containers’ of markets for goods and services. Economic geographers

point to the fact that economic globalization produces a two-way
power relationship between TNCs and states, rather than enabling
TNCs to be dominant. TNCs need access to the national markets that
states are the political institutions in charge of, and in that sense states still
have power. It is important to realize, however, that they no longer
have the same kind of power as they did in the 1950s when most firms
in the wealthier countries made and sold products within national eco-
nomic territories, and in many countries such as the UK, France or
Italy firms were owned by state governments (that is, ‘nationalized’).
States also act as containers in another way because of the persis-
tence of distinctive cultures associated with individual nation-states
which shape the way in which economic production is undertaken
in different places around the world. Geographers have made
extensive use of a wider social scientific literature that suggests capit-
alism still comes in a variety of flavours, if you like. This so-called
‘varieties of capitalism’ literature argues that firms, economic institu-
tions, rules and practices within different national economies mean
that economies operate differently in different countries and that
this influences how successful (or not) these national economies and
firms are at generating wealth.
Finally, states act as both competitors and collaborators in the
complex global economy that exists today. They are competitors
because they try to maximize their wealth through the best trading
position they can achieve internationally. States try to attract
investment from firms to build factories, create jobs and thus increase
the amount of goods and services produced within their territorial
area. However, geographers are also interested in the nature and
patterns of collaboration between states in the global economy as
they try to maximize the welfare of their populations through
relationships that are both political and economic in nature. The
major way in which states do this in today’s world is through
regional trade agreements (RTAs) and forms of regional economic
integration. In the case of the former, there are many trade agree-
ments between states in different regions of the globe that essentially
offer favourable terms of access to national markets for neighbouring
states. The main way this is done is by reducing the amount of
taxes (known as tariffs) that have to be paid by favoured trade
partners to import goods into each other’s national marketplace. In
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 71

the late 20th century, there was a rapid increase in the number of
these kinds of agreements and at least a third of all world trade now
takes place within the area covered by an RTA. Regarding the
latter form of collaboration, there are at least four kinds of regional
economic integration which are politically negotiated between
states: free trade areas, customs unions, common markets and eco-
nomic union. Listed in this order, they represent progressive greater
degrees of economic collaboration between states. The aim is to
increase the wealth-generating capacity of these regional blocs of states
by making industries more efficient through internal competition and
economies of scale. There are now many examples ranging from
free trade areas such as the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) and the Association of South East Asian Nations
(ASEAN) to economic unions like the European Union (EU).

THE EUROPEAN UNION

The European Union is an economic and political supranational
body comprised of 27 member nation-states. The EU had its origins
in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the
European Economic Community (EEC), the latter created by the
signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Six countries were founding
members: France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg,
Belgium and Italy. During the 1960s, the early institutions merged
but it was not until the 1970s that the community grew. It was
enlarged from six to 12 members with the accession of the UK,
Denmark and the Irish Republic in 1973, of Greece in 1981 and of
Portugal and Spain in 1986. During the 1990s, followed by referenda,
the 12 were joined by Austria, Finland and Sweden but with the collapse
of communism in Eastern Europe, many East European countries
stated their desire to join the EU from the outset and a further ten
states (including also Malta and Cyprus) enlarged the EU to 25 member
states in 2004, with Romania and Bulgaria also joining in 2007. A
political debate is now continuing around the increasingly contentious
issue of whether further states should join the EU, most notably Turkey.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the organization evolved from a free
trade area into a common market. However, a process of what is
known as ‘deepening’ of integration during the 1980s led first to a
customs union with the progressive removal of border controls and
72 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

then to full economic union, culminating in the introduction of the

euro as a single currency in 2000 (although only 17 of the member
states have adopted the currency). However since the global economic
downturn of 2007, the EU has faced a series of crises in the econo-
mies of weaker member states such as Ireland, Spain and Portugal
within the eurozone, creating doubt about the continued viability of the
single currency. These problems illustrate the challenges that face all
forms of regional economic integration in promoting common eco-
nomic policies where the economic performance of different member
states varies significantly. In the second decade of the 21st century,
the EU thus faces a major dilemma as to how to sustain economic
integration without further political integration.

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND TERRORISM

The world in which we live is, of course, neither a peaceful nor

conflict-free one. The history of nationalism and nation-states since
the 19th century, as with earlier periods in human history, is one
full of conflict and wars. The global political map that you can look
at in any atlas at the start of the 21st century is thus a product of
many centuries of conflict between different groups of people in
different territories. Today’s national borders are largely the product
of previous historical conflict that has produced agreed boundaries
between different national communities. Of major significance are
the First and Second World Wars, which represented the largest
and most geographically extensive conflicts in human history, and
led to the establishment of many new nation-states.
Political geographers are therefore interested in the geographical
factors that shape the stability and degree of conflict (or lack of it)
in the international political system. In the aftermath of the Second
World War, a new world political order emerged that sought to
maintain international security and prevent future global-scale con-
flict. The world political map in 1945 was dominated by two major
‘superpower’ rivals – the United States and the Soviet Union – that
each held significant influence over other nation-states. With the
end of the Cold War in 1991 (see box in Chapter 2), there
emerged what has been described as a ‘new world order’. The US
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 73

remained as a lone superpower but, since most of the communist

world embraced free market capitalism the international security of
the Cold War era has also been challenged. Political geographers
are particularly interested in how these security challenges corre-
spond in large part to a re-scaling of security issues in global society.
On the one hand, at the nation-state scale, the stability provided by
the two superpowers in the Cold War has been eroded as indivi-
dual states have challenged international security in advancing their
own interests. A growing number of nation-states have developed
nuclear weapons (India and Pakistan), and others are seeking to do so
(Iran, North Korea), which represents a threat to international security.
Furthermore, the capacity of either supranational institutions (the
UN Security Council) or the remaining superpower (the US) to
act as a global policeman has also arguably been reduced with
military interventions at preventing ‘rogue states’ from destabilizing
international security meeting with at best limited success (for
example, the Gulf War of 1990–1). Conversely, the capacity of
potential new 21st-century superpowers in the form of China and
India to take on a policing role, at least in Asia, is increasing.
Finally, new kinds of threats to international security emerged at
the end of the 20th century from above and below the scale of
nation-states. This represents another element of human geo-
graphy’s interest in (political) globalization, and the re-scaling of
political movements and identities in today’s world. At the fore-
front of this is the emergence of what has been termed ‘global ter-
rorism’. As an idea and practice, terrorism is not new, of course. It
dates back to the so-called ‘Reign of Terror’ (1793–4) during the
(second) French Revolution and refers to the unlawful use or
threatened use of force or violence. This can be either by one
person or an organized group, and terrorists target people or property
with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or govern-
ments. Terrorism is usually grounded in ideological or political motives
and historically has involved activities including assassinations,
bombings, random killings and hijackings. It has therefore been a
threat to the security of nation-states for several centuries, but it is
only in recent decades that it has scaled up to the international level.
Global terrorism thus entails attacks by terrorist organizations against
many nation-states and the international community, rather than a
nationally based one. Foremost in the emergence of global
74 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

terrorism is the Islamist organization al-Qaeda, which was responsible

for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the
Pentagon in Virginia, as well as various attempted attacks in the Middle
East, Europe and Australasia. The rise of this type of globalized
terrorism prompted the then US President George W. Bush to
declare a new international ‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of 9/11.

AL-QAEDA: A GLOBAL TERRORIST

ORGANIZATION?
Since the late 1980s, al-Qaeda in particular has provoked debate
regarding the scale and nature of terrorist activity in the globalized
world we live in. The group came to international prominence with
the two attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 – the
latter being the most devastating terrorist attack in history. It was
9/11 that led many commentators to argue that a new era of global
terrorism has begun, since terrorist groups such as the IRA had
previously tended to focus their activities within one nation and their
ideological basis similarly had been related to the politics associated
with that area. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, makes global-scale claims
about the nature of its political basis (the intervention of the Western
countries in Islamic states around the globe) and has always sought
to undertake terrorist activity globally. Importantly, however, there
remains debate about to what extent it really represents a ‘global orga-
nization’ as opposed to a regional or national one with membership
comprised of cells across the global Islamic diaspora. Groups around the
world claim to be part of al-Qaeda but it is not clear that there really is any
central hierarchy of command, especially in light of the killing of Osama
bin Laden by US security forces in 2011. It may therefore be more a
loosely associated set of groups that see advantage in claiming to be
part of a coherent global organization when in fact they are acting
more or less independently. Human geography thus sees the emer-
gence of al-Qaeda in the wider context of the complicated development
of political globalization, the globalization of ideas and cultural values
and new forms of global political struggle both above and below the
scale of nation-states. They would point, for example, to the way in
which representations of al-Qaeda retain echoes of colonial discourses
on the irrationality and dangerousness of the Arab and Eastern world
(see the discussion in the next section on imaginative geographies).
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 75

CULTURE
After discussing how human geographers are concerned with the
development of nation-states and their relationship with the economy,
it is a natural next step to turn to the issue of culture. Culture has
become an increasingly central concept within human geography in
the aftermath of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in the 1980s and 1990s.
Cultural geography has thus become one of the fastest-growing and
arguably most dynamic sub-disciplinary strands to the subject over the
last couple of decades, and cultural ideas are increasingly permeating
many areas of the discipline that previously paid little attention to this
dimension to social life.
Culture is a notoriously difficult concept, with academic
definitions running into the hundreds. Put simply, culture is a
system of shared meanings based around things like language,
religion, communities, customs, ethnicity and other identities that
are present in all human life. Culture is therefore everywhere, and
present in everyday life; for geographers, there is no distinction
between the popular (mis)conception of ‘culture’ as fine art, theatre
or opera versus the rest of what meanings people share and how
that shapes what they do in everyday life. Culture then exists
everywhere at a variety of scales, and is dynamic and constantly
changing as people’s shared meanings interact and change through
time and space. In that sense, culture is unavoidably something that
everyone on the planet is involved in rather than a specific or
limited ‘thing’ we do or do not possess (Crang 1998). It is simply
‘what humans do’ and is thus a kind of process with multiple forms
rather than an explanatory variable or a single cause. That does not
mean, however, that it does not have ‘real’ manifestations; whether
in the architecture of a city, the products we buy in supermarkets
or the films we watch in the cinema, culture is all around us in the
material world and people’s behaviours and practices. This is
the human geographer’s view of culture today (as distinct from
earlier ideas of culture within human geography discussed in the
Introduction).
To understand the different strands of cultural geography,
the following section draws out three different major areas:
imaginative geographies, the consumption of places, and spaces of
consumption.
76 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES

The term ‘imaginative geographies’ is widely linked to the ideas of

the social theorist Edward Said used to describe the ways in which
other places, people and landscapes are represented and how these
so-called imaginings reflect the desires and preconceived ideas of
their inventors (cf. Said 1979) and thus shape action. It is also there-
fore concerned with the power relations that exist between the
inventors of ideas and the subjects of their imagination. Said’s work is
concerned with the history of colonialism and Western imperialism
since the 16th century. Said argued that non-Western cultures (and
especially those of the so-called ‘Orient’) have often been repre-
sented by people in the West (in Europe and North America) as
being backward, static and inferior. Importantly, he argues that this
is tied up with how Europeans and others in the West have his-
torically seen themselves as dynamic, progressive and hence super-
ior. This has led to a set of imaginative geographies that oppose the
West against ‘the Rest’ that, he argues, have played a hugely
important role in the nature of global politics and human history
in the last two centuries. The West’s identity is based on the opposition
of a civilized European world that is the absolute opposite of an
uncivilized non-European ‘other’ (see Introduction and Chapter 7).
Such arguments echo the wider postmodern debate about identity
around the concept of self and other we encountered in the
Introduction and will again discuss in Chapter 7.
Said’s arguments have been controversial within and beyond
human geography because they pose huge challenges to the entire
way in which we understand global history and the nature of cul-
ture. Important here is the concept of representation, as also dis-
cussed in the Introduction. It refers in short to the cultural practices
and forms through which people interpret and portray the world
around them. Clearly Said’s proposed representations are not the only
ways Europeans in the last two centuries have imagined non-
Europe, but his approach has been enormously important within
human geography in the aftermath of the cultural turn. Cultural geo-
graphers have now taken the concept of imaginative geographies and
applied it much more broadly to a whole range of issues in the world.
However, it is important to realize that in essence all geographies
are ‘imaginative’ insofar as they are abstractions that are socially
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 77

constructed. In that sense, the use of the word ‘imaginative’ some-

times causes confusion because it is associated in the popular mind
with an individual’s imagination and even fantasy, implying unreality.
Just because geographies are ‘imagined’ does not mean they do not
have real manifestations – the use of the word ‘imaginative’ is used
to denote that these are representations rather than meaning that
imaginative geographies are in some way ‘unreal’. Driver (2008)
makes the point that the study of imaginative geographies is about
taking images of spaces and places seriously as things that affect
actions and outcomes in the world. Just because the Third Reich’s
representations of a German state needing more living space in the
early 20th century were social constructions does not mean they
did not have real effects on the world. Imaginative geographies
are therefore ‘real’ not because they correspond to complete or
accurate reproductions of the world, but because they both
reflect and sustain how people imagine that world and have real
effects.

CONSUMPTION

The issue of consumption has become increasingly important in

human geography. If economic geography in an earlier period was
focused on the location of production activities, then today human
geography has become very much concerned with the geographical
nature of how goods and services are consumed after they have
been produced. Consumption can be defined as the use of all the
products that people create through labour – that can be material
goods (whether it is food such as a Big Mac or a device such as an
iPod) or it could be a service provided to you (staying in a hotel or
having a haircut). For human geographers, the important issue here
is that consumption is always ‘profoundly contextual’ insofar as it is
‘embedded in particular spaces, times and social relations’ (Crang
and Jackson 2001: 2). As a social practice it is linked to people’s
desires (which are shaped by a range of factors including pleasure,
social status and sense of identity), and from a historical perspective
it is argued to be linked to the development of modernity since the
17th century and the emergence of an industrial capitalism that
enabled a mass consumer society to develop during the 20th cen-
tury. However, despite its enormous significance, in human
78 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

geography and some other social sciences little attention was paid to
consumption and it was rather simplistically represented as some-
thing that simply ‘followed’ production. Things got made and
people then consumed them. It is only in recent decades that
human geography (along with other subjects) has shifted to a much
more sophisticated view of the production-consumption relation-
ship. It is now appreciated that this relationship is complex because
although consumption may follow production, the latter also
depends on consumption. Furthermore, human geographers and
other social scientists widely agree that consumption does not cor-
respond to an inevitable final moment at the end of a one-directional
chain of economic production.
Undoubtedly part of the growing interest human geographers
have taken in consumption is the growing importance of it in the
world economy. Retail industries have expanded enormously over
the last 50 years, employing a growing proportion of the workforce
in countries’ economies and increasing in power over more
traditional ‘production’ industries such as manufacturing through
supplier chains. Think of the classic examples of ‘global’ clothing
brands you will find in any shopping mall or airport whether
you are in London, Paris, Los Angeles or Hong Kong. The actual
difference between a pair of jeans, trainers or a shirt produced by
one firm as opposed to another is very much secondary to how
they create an image that entices people to consume the brand.
You wear a certain brand because it is ‘cool’ or ‘fashionable’ – that
is it is perceived to be desirable. People buy Nike over Adidas
because they like the lifestyle image it creates. You might buy
an Apple computer as opposed to a PC because of its stylishness.
And of course a whole industry in itself exists around the creation
and maintenance of these consumption images, whether conven-
tional advertising or the endorsement of products by celebrities.
Consumption then is a crucial part of our everyday lives and one
that has become increasingly central to the world economy and
society. While, as an issue, it certainly concerns sociologists and
economists who have gone as far as to argue that ‘it is consumption,
not production, that is the central motor of society’ (Corrigan 1997: 1),
human geographers have had an enormous amount to say about
consumption as an inherently (and increasingly) geographical
phenomenon.
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 79

THE CONSUMPTION OF SPACE AND PLACE

We need to consider two of the major aspects to this recent

geographical interest in consumption. Geographers have argued that
consumption often occurs in specific sites and in essence ‘makes’
place, but equally in today’s world it is bound up with the processes
of globalization. At the cross over between economic and cultural
geography, it is important to consider two strands of the debate
around the spatiality of consumption.
First, there is a conceptual analysis within human geography
about how the consumption of spaces needs to be understood as a
complex interaction between the global scale and local contexts. As
previously discussed, a key aspect of globalization is the transmission
of ideas, values and practices at the global level. Consumption
practices are heavily caught up in this. Consider, for example, how
global branded goods are consumed differently in a vast number of
spaces across the planet. Some commodities are also consumed in
non-material spaces – feature films or computer games that are
consumed in virtual spaces. An important aspect to this debate is the
degree to which modern consumption is a form of cultural
imperialism whereby Western products (particularly American ones)
are imposed on the rest of the world. Such products are sometimes
argued to promote Western values over others, and thus to produce
a loss of ‘local’ or authentic cultural difference. We have already
encountered this kind of argument in Chapter 2, around the idea
that cultural globalization is producing homogeneity (cultural
sameness) across the world. Consumption activities are seen by
many within and beyond geography as a leading mechanism by
which cultural globalization occurs. Such an argument is a con-
troversial and contested one, but nevertheless accounts for the
growing interest by geographers in the power relationships that
underpin consumption. In that sense, human geography has become
ever more interested in the broad spatiality and geographies of con-
sumption that many theorists see as being central to the development of
global economy and society.
However, closely related to the issues of the global-scale geography
and the spatiality of consumption is the issue of how consumption
occurs in ‘places’. Human geographers have been fond of the idea
that consumption ‘takes place’ to express not only how it occurs as a
80 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

practice happening in certain places across the planet but also how
it is actually recreating and transforming those places. The key
argument here is that our imaginative geographies attach attributes
to specific places which we consume, and global capitalist consumer
culture produces and sells global arrays of cultural and geographical
differences. Crang (1998) argues that rather than eradicating cultural
difference and producing some kind of ‘end to geography’, con-
sumption in today’s world thus ‘(re)produces geographies, framing
certain local places of consumption as global centres’ (Crang 1998:
386). The classic example of this is the emergence over the last
century of theme parks such as Disney World. These parks are
organized into thematic consumption spaces based around imagined
geographical–cultural differences: ‘Wild West lands’ based on an
imagined geography of the American West of the 19th century or
‘Adventure lands’ based on imagined geographies of European
colonialism (think of pirates and treasure islands or jungles and
exploration) (Bryman 1995). Another good (if extreme) example is
the way in which Las Vegas has developed the theme park idea
with casinos along its famous strip themed as mini, stylized, con-
sumable versions of places – Paris, New York, Egypt. More
recently, much the same has happened in Macao, the ‘Las Vegas of
Asia’. Cultural and urban geographers have argued that these theme
park ‘places’ are in fact model examples of a wider process hap-
pening beyond their boundaries. A more everyday example is the
design of shopping malls as themed consumer spaces that have also
begun to look like theme parks, in that instance quite clearly related
to the goals of global capitalist firms (see box).

THE SHOPPING MALL: CATHEDRAL OF

CONSUMPTION?
Cities across the globe are increasingly dotted with large shopping
malls and more are being built every year. Whether you live in the
developed or developing world, the mall is becoming a major feature
of urban landscapes. Much work in geography has considered these
consumption spaces, likening them to ‘cathedrals’ of global capital-
ism. Malls are places designed and built specifically for consumption,
and evolved from the early shopping arcades that first appeared
in big cities such as London, Paris and New York at the end of the
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 81

19th century. Malls are designed to maximize the exposure of people

to the goods and services being offered for consumption, and are
purpose-built material spaces exclusively dedicated to consumption
(as opposed to urban shopping streets that also have other functions).
Geographers are especially interested in this interaction of material
space, architectural design, economic practice and cultural attri-
butes. Malls incorporate specific physical design features aimed at
forcing people to pass as many shop-fronts as possible: escalators
that make you loop along long stretches of shop frontage, maze-like
pathways that do the same or public seating designed to prevent
people from lingering. Airport terminals often employ the same
tactic as they have become more mall-like, forcing passengers
through complex duty-free shopping areas that are hard to escape
from (the idea was also first developed by Las Vegas casinos that
make it hard for gamblers to find an exit through a maze of tables and
gambling machines). The point is that the whole premise of these
spaces is to encourage consumption whether that is through thematic
decor and images or by maximizing people’s exposure to products.

However, there is a further aspect of the consumption of place we

need to mention. That is the way in which increasingly all places
(not just ones specifically designed for the purpose) are being
packaged up (or ‘commodified’) as things to be consumed. One
important factor behind this is the growth of tourism as a global
industry. Think about guide books such as the Lonely Planet series,
which now provides near-comprehensive coverage of every coun-
try worldwide. As with other guide books, specific places are identi-
fied that tourists go to consume visually and experience. The place is
consumed by you as a visitor as you gaze at a famous landscape or
landmark such as the Eiffel Tower, or experience the ‘atmosphere
of a place’ such as Chinatown in San Francisco. Most books in that
series offer the ‘top 20 places’ to visit, the ‘must-see’ places to be
consumed by you as a tourist. If you go to Australia that is likely to
include Sydney Harbour and Ayers Rock (Uluru), or to Thailand the
Imperial Palace in Bangkok or the beach at Phuket (the latter being a
famous location from the James Bond film The Man With the Golden
Gun). These material places also quite often become physically altered
82 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

to meet the expectations of tourists. The point is that places across

the planet are becoming things that we know about and expect or
desire to consume. This consumption of place as a phenomenon is
connected with a range of transformations in today’s globalized
world: the growth of the retail, tourism and other leisure industries,
the deliberate marketing of places as a means of achieving economic
growth and regeneration, improved travel and communications
industries and of course global cultural flows.

LIVERPOOL, BALTIMORE AND BILBAO: PLACE

CONSUMPTION AS A STRATEGY FOR ECONOMIC
REGENERATION
Since the 1970s, many industrial cities in the countries of the global
North have suffered from deindustrialization (see Chapter 5), and
from the 1980s, urban planners and policy makers have made use of
what is known as ‘culture-led’ regeneration. In essence, this is about
reversing economic decline by turning industrial cities into attractive
places people want to consume. This deliberate planning strategy
involves a range of strategies for changing the nature and character
of these cities as places in order to promote consumption. It has
obviously involved the physical transformation of areas of the urban
fabric through a mixture of restoring old buildings for new uses and
the construction of new buildings and developments. During the late
1980s, Baltimore in the United States was one of the first cities to
develop this approach. Planners in Baltimore focused on regenerat-
ing the old industrial and dock waterfront area of the city, which was
largely abandoned and derelict, explicitly aiming to create a place
within the city that people would come to enjoy retail, leisure and
recreation. The image of the place as an attractive one that people
would come to consume as a landscape was an important central
element of the strategy. People would come to Baltimore’s water-
front to live, shop or undertake cultural activities in a landscape that
they found aesthetically pleasing.
This approach has now been replicated in many cities across the
world as an almost universally accepted way of marketing places to
achieve economic regeneration. In the UK, one of the best examples
of a similar waterfront place to be consumed is the Albert Dock area
of Liverpool. Over the last 30 years or so, this process has involved
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 83

the restoration of old Victorian docks, turning them into retail and
cultural leisure spaces (boutiques, art galleries, hotels, museums) that
attract both local residents and tourists to consume a reconfigured
place. Museums play on the significant of the city’s maritime history
and its fame as the birthplace of The Beatles. Art galleries also try to
establish the area as a tourist destination. Bilbao in northern Spain is
another example where, in this instance, a newly constructed attraction
has altered the international image of the city, making it a desirable
place to visit and consume. Here the construction of a startling new
Guggenheim art gallery on the waterfront forms the focus and has
been very successful in changing Bilbao’s international image from a
decaying industrial town that would have been the last place any
tourist visiting Spain would think of going to. Bilbao has been suc-
cessful in creating an image of a trendy, avant-garde place with a
cutting-edge art gallery and a ‘cool’ image. The consumption of this
kind of place is thus attractive as a contrast to existing images of tour-
ism in historic Spanish cities such as Seville or Granada. (See also the
section on urban regeneration in Chapter 5.)

LANDSCAPE
As discussed in the Introduction, the regionalist approach in geo-
graphy developed a tradition of recording and representing the
features of different regions around the world. Landscape was
always recognized as a composite that obviously included material
aspects of the Earth’s surface (the land) but that human beings also
had a central role in creating. During the 20th century, cultural
geography developed this idea as its basis, making close linkages
between the people living in an area and the form and develop-
ment of landscapes. Earlier cultural geography essentially saw any
given landscape as a gradual outcome of people with a certain cul-
ture living in it over long periods of time. Landscape was a kind of
record of cultural change, with its form changing incrementally as
cultural values change (Crang 1998). This kind of geographical
approach to landscape is associated with the work of a group
known as the Berkeley school at the University of California
between the 1920s and 1950s and its leading figure, Professor Carl
84 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Sauer (1889–1975). Another example of this kind of approach is

the work of the 1950s British economic historian W. G. Hoskins
(1908–92) and his famous book The Making of the English Landscape
(1955). Hoskins’s account is based on his in-the-field observations of
the evidence in the English landscape of past human culture – whether
that is the origins of the famous dry stone walls in the Yorkshire
Dales or the way in which the feudal field patterns of medieval
period remain in southern England.
Since the 1970s, human geography has developed a very different
approach to landscape that reflects the radical transformation of
ideas from the cultural turn and postmodern or poststructural philo-
sophies that have permeated the subject. Put simply, human geo-
graphy has shifted away from the idea that landscape can be
understood as an observable, external whole (Wylie 2007). Human
geography in the 20th century approached landscape as a kind of
‘field science’ based around geographers standing in the field and
observing landscapes to collect ‘facts’. Since the late 1970s, geo-
graphy has increasingly questioned whether neutral observation of a
landscape is in fact possible. Instead the subject has sought to con-
ceptualize the qualities of landscape – that is ‘landscape as a milieu of
cultural practices and values’ (Wylie 2007: 5). Today, human geo-
graphy does not conceptualize a landscape as a set of observable
‘cultural facts’ in any simple or straightforward way.
Within this shift, at least two major strands to this thinking are
evident in the subject in recent decades. The first approach to
landscape involves an adoption of ideas (and particularly meth-
odologies) from the arts and humanities. The key idea is that land-
scape can be ‘read’ in the way you might read a book or a text in
order to understand the nature of the societies that were involved
in creating those landscapes. By the 1980s, human geographers, had
begun to conceptualize landscapes as ‘signifying systems’ – that is,
an array of symbols showing the values through which a society is
organized (Crang 1998). Such an approach has been applied by
geographers to a whole range of landscapes from the unconven-
tional micro-space of the household through to the landscapes of
the national spaces that convey ideas of nationalism already dis-
cussed in this chapter. With regard to the latter, we have discussed
how imaginative geographies are based around certain representa-
tions of landscapes and are often used to convey certain kinds of
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 85

relationships between people, between people and places and

around the meanings of identity. However, there is more to John
Constable’s early Victorian rural English scenes than just a shared
geography of British identity. Paintings such as The Hay Wain
(1821), which you can see in the National Gallery in London, show
people farming in a green and pleasant landscape framed by trees
and hedgerows in a certain way. The views are panoramic, from a
distance, and give the viewer a sense of being immersed in the
landscape.
This style of British painting in the 18th and 19th centuries is
known as ‘picturesque’, generally used these days on postcards.
However, in 18th and 19th-century Britain, ‘picturesque’ had a
more specific meaning associated with a new importance placed on
images of the countryside in art. What was important was the
enjoyment of viewing landscape with this sense of distance, and
the way the image conveys a feeling of power and authority over
the landscape. Cultural geographers have argued that the development
was linked to the fact that the British Empire at home and abroad
created a need for middle-class landowners to understand their
place in developing land. Being able to represent landscapes in this
way became associated with good taste and high social standing in
British society. (It is also evident in poetry.) Later representations of
British landscapes shift to different symbolic meanings with, in the
20th century, images showing vigorous physical activity in the
countryside being seen as an antidote to bland, oppressive urban
living (Matless 1995).
The key issue is that reading landscapes can reveal both symbolic
systems of meaning and the social relations in societies, and cultural
geography has developed this approach far beyond its application to
historical paintings. Reading household spaces as landscapes reveals
the nature of power relations between men and women in a
domestic setting, or in the case of national spaces, the architectural
form of buildings or planning of settlements can provide insight
into the dominant ideas of nationalism in a nation-state at a given
historical moment. Think of the royal parks and palace complexes
that have historically been built by different states from in both
Western Europe and Asia (China, Thailand, Vietnam). Human
geography in the aftermath of the cultural turn has thus applied a
symbolic approach to understanding landscape from many angles.
86 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Feminist human geographers have, for example, also read historical

landscapes in landscape painting to provide insight into the position
of women in a given society in the same way that cultural geo-
graphers have brought insight into the power relations inherent in
Western imperialism from paintings and other landscapes images.
However, more recently, a second strand of geographical thinking
has also become increasingly evident in cultural geography which
draws on the different philosophical basis around phenomenology,
and also on methodological approaches within cultural anthro-
pology. This approach argues that landscape needs to be understood
as a kind of cultural practice that its inhabitants live through and
undertake. Cultural geographers have thus become interested in
conceptualizing landscape from the viewpoints of those who live in
it and actively make and remake it. The concept of ‘dwelling’ is
used in this strand of geographical thinking to conceptualize how
what a landscape ‘is’ is not necessarily just something that can be
‘viewed at a distance’ but is also a lived experience that people
produce through cultural practices.
Overall, landscape is understood both as a complex representa-
tion that reflects certain sets of social meanings and relationships
between people and also as a material place that people inhabit and
is made and remade as they live in it. While landscape in a popular
everyday sense is often associated with some idea of the natural
world and countryside (see section on the rural and ‘rurality’
below), human geographers see it as corresponding to a particular
way of thinking about and representing the world around us in
ways that have both historical and geographical specificity.
Landscapes are cultural things, not intrinsic natural phenomena that
exist in the world outside of human meaning. This applies whether
we are talking about images of landscapes (paintings, photographs,
films) or material landscapes themselves (think of familiar images of
the English Lake District, the American prairies or the Australian
bush as examples). It is also fair to say that the concept of landscape
remains heavily debated within human geography and has a
number of competing conceptualizations. As Wylie (2007) argues,
at the centre of this in human geography is a tension between the
complex and difficult issue of whether landscape is something we
look at (an image like a painting) or a material thing we live in (and
undertake actions in as well as experience).
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 87

THE RURAL AND ‘RURALITY’

The ways in which human geographers have thought about ideas of

landscape and representation brings us to another important debate:
the nature of the ‘rural’. Put simply, the ‘rural’ can be defined as
areas ‘dominated by extensive land uses such as agriculture or forestry,
or by large open spaces of underdeveloped land’ (Cloke 2000: 718).
It can also include places where there are small settlements that are
closely related to the landscape and which ‘are perceived as rural’
(Cloke 2000: 718). However, this last point is key – that what is
rural depends on people’s perception. Hopefully it should be clear
in light of the preceding discussion of how geographers understand
landscape as a social construct that what people understand by the
word ‘rural’ will vary enormously according to where they come
from and who they are. It is different in different cultures and in
different places. Rurality in Western countries has often been
understood as an attractive rural space (think of the European rural
areas that people visit on vacation), which contrasts significantly
with other places in the world (for example, polluted, dangerous
and unpleasant urban spaces). Yet in the global South, rural areas
may be remote, isolated, dangerous and without amenities and
services. Geographers have therefore approached the issue of how
we might define a rural area along two simultaneous lines. On the
one hand, an empirical approach can develop ways of measuring
how ‘rural’ places are in a functional way, primarily by assessing the
nature of land use and other criteria, such as population density. On
the other hand, there is a debate in human geography that is con-
ceptual in relation to the nature of rurality, concerned with those
issues that we have been addressing in the section: how rural places
are constructed through imagined geographies.
One of the major issues that runs through both approaches is that
the meaning of rural is based on an opposite – the idea that some
places are ‘urban’. In the modern word, the idea of rurality is gen-
erally used to refer to areas of land that are not covered by towns
and cities. The problem is that in reality there is much ambiguity,
depending on which criteria or measure you use, as to whether
many places are ‘urban’ or ‘rural’. Many cities in the global South, for
example, have extensive hinterlands where land uses that look very
urban – houses and factories – are mixed with what we traditionally
88 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

regard as classic rural land uses – notably agriculture. If you go to

India or Thailand, many of the areas around large cities exist in the
part-urban, part-rural form. Similarly, densely populated Japan is
famous for its complex mixture of urban, industrial and agricultural
patchwork of land use. If you take the bullet train from Tokyo to
another large Japanese city, the landscape that speeds by is a com-
plex mosaic of these different land uses. This has produced terms
such as ‘semi-urban’ and ‘peri-urban’ to try and describe this.
However, more recently the binary opposition of ‘urban versus
rural’ has been recognized as being problematic, and geographers
tend more often now to speak of a ‘rural-urban continuum’.
Beyond conceptual and definitional debates, human geography is
interested in a range of dimensions and processes related to rural areas.
This is a substantial area of work within the subject, and it is impossible
to go into all the many debates in depth here. However, at least three
areas of human geographical work on rurality need highlighting. The
first is an interest in the changing nature of rural spaces in the context
of wider processes in today’s world. For example, geographers have
of course been concerned with rural demography and increasing
urbanization especially across the global South. More and more of
the world’s population live in towns and cities in the 21st century
than ever before, and issues from the rate of depopulation in rural
areas to the impact on rural economies and lifestyles have been of central
concern to geographers. Another important process is that of neo-
liberalization and in particular the impact of the globalization on rural
economies. In many parts of the world, the nature of rural areas is
changing rapidly as agricultural industries become globalized and
transnational agricultural firms increasingly dominate.
Second, human geographers have also become increasingly
interested in the politics of rurality, along with new kinds of politics
in rural areas. In the wealthier countries of the global North, for
example, the development of many industrial and environmental
policies in the EU has been strongly influenced by politics based on
rural areas (witness the influence of French farmers as a political
movement). This applies equally to the politics of rural areas in the
global South with, for example, the role of the Zapatista uprising in
the early 1990s in one of the poorest and most rural states of
Mexico playing a key role in global resistance to neoliberal
globalization as discussed in Chapter 3.
 STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE 89

Finally, cultural geographers have also set out to examine the

dynamic nature of rural cultures, and particularly how globalization
and increasing mobility have produced an intermixing of urban and
rural people to a degree to which it not clear whether there is any
correspondence between rural territorial space and rural social
space. Cultural geographers are also interested in how rural places
are being commodified and consumed in much the same way as we
have discussed in relation to urban places in this chapter. For
example, global tourism has led to new imagined ideas of rurality
based on ‘natural’ experiences that tourists can consume. An
example would be adventure tourism in rural Australia, New
Zealand or the national parks of the US and Canada, where activ-
ities such as white water rafting, bungee jumping, wilderness skiing
or exploring forest canopy walkways have commodified a kind of
rural spectacle and altered the economies of rural areas in these
countries (see Cloke 2005a).

SUMMARY
In this chapter we have considered:

 How human (political) geographers have understood the history

of states, the nature of nationalism and the evolution and
emergence of a system of modern nation-states since the 19th
century;
 The way in which a geographical approach enables a sophisticated
understanding of the many complex aspects to the relationship
between nation-states and economic activity within their territories
in today’s globalized world;
 The rise of new challenges and threats to nation-states in the
21st century, in particular the need for ‘supranational’ trade blocs
such as the EU and the threat posed by globalized terrorism;
 How culture has become an increasingly important concept in
human geography, and how cultural geographers understand
culture as everywhere in everyday life, existing at a variety of
scales;
 The significance of imaginative geographies, and how cultural
geographers have applied the concept to a range of spatial
representations of social and cultural life;
90 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

 The nature of consumption as a process and how human geo-

graphy is concerned to understand how we consume places and
spaces;
 How human geography has approached the concept of landscape,
particularly debates around reading it as a ‘text’ that is inscribed
with representations and bound up with power relations;
 Human geography’s theoretical understandings of what it means
for a place to be ‘rural’, along with the changing nature of rural
spaces, and the politics of rurality.

FURTHER READING
Dicken, P. (2011) Global Shift. London: Sage.
For the relationship between states and the economy, look at Chapter 6, ‘The
state really does matter’.

Mansvelt, J. (2005) Geographies of Consumption. London: Sage.

This book provides a wide-ranging and thorough discussion of consumption
and how it has been conceptualized and analysed in human geography.

Woods, M. (2005) Rural Geography. London: Sage.

Gives a good overview of rural geographies using a thematic and conceptual
approach.

Wylie, J. (2007) Landscape. London: Routledge.

An excellent overview of the theoretical debates around landscape from a
human geographical perspective. It also provides a comprehensive account of
the issues around the concept of representation.

WEB RESOURCES
If you have not seen it before, have a look at the information website of the
European Commission, which has a lot on this supranational organization
including policy: http://europa.eu/index_en.htm
The Royal Geographical Society’s Rural Geography Research Group has a list
of interesting reading and activities/events in this area: www.geog.ply-
mouth.ac.uk/ruralgeography/membersh.htm
CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES
 5

This chapter considers some of the major debates within economic

and urban geography around the nature and significance of cities
and regions in today’s world, and how this relates to the complex
geographies of industries in the global economy.

REGIONS
In everyday terms, the word ‘region’ has two common uses: either
as an area of territory within a nation-state or as a larger area usually
comprising several adjacent nation-states on the world map. Human
geography makes use of both concepts of the region, and it can be
very confusing terminology if the scale of the region being dis-
cussed is not made clear. In the 20th century, the concept of
‘region’ developed as human geography tried to become a ‘spatial
science’ (see Introduction). Regions were reconceived as a certain
scale, and as corresponding to systems that linked to larger scales
such as the national or global. This represented a major shift away
from the 19th-century regional geography that saw regions as areas
of territory closely linked to local cultures which in turn shaped the
nature of the landscape in that area. The region has thus been an
important point of conceptual conflict and argument in human
geography with recent work in light of the cultural turn rejecting
92 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

both the earlier descriptive approach of regional geography and the

idea that regions could be conceptualized in the objective terms of
a spatial science approach. Debates in the subject about the nature
of regions are thus today closely linked to those about place, seeing
regions as partial, interlinked spaces that include social, cultural,
political and economic phenomena.
It is worth elaborating a little more on the use of the region
within economic geography where the (sub-national) region has
been one of the major focuses of both theorizing and research. The
major reason is that since the Industrial Revolution, which began
in Western Europe in the 18th century, economic activity has
identifiably developed in regions. That is to say, while certain
smaller localities such as towns and cities have been and continue to
be important in economic development (see section on cities
below), the rise and evolution of industries over the last two cen-
turies or so has been most commonly characterized at the regional
scale. Whether in the case of the historic emergence of textiles in
north-west England in the late 18th century or of the development
of mass manufacturing industries in the north-east United States in
the mid-20th century, it is the region that human geographers have
argued to be the key stage upon which some industries take hold.
Within and beyond geography, therefore, the concept of the regional
economy is firmly established as one of the major geographical units
of analysis in economic activity. In recent decades, this apparently close
relationship between particular industries and groups of firms within
a region has become one of the major debates within the subject.
In the current era of economic globalization, the idea that groups of
firms located close together within a geographic region has become
one of the major debates within and in several other social science
disciplines (notably economics) as well. One of the central ideas is
that it is regional rather than national economies – based on these
competing clusters of firms in various industries scattered across the
planet – that are the major leaders of production and innovation in
the global economy. Such an argument makes understanding
regions all the more important in a globalized world, but it is also
controversial. We will come to examine this debate about the nature
of regional economies shortly, but first we need to understand how
human geographers understand the major processes that have
shaped regional economic development.
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 93

INDUSTRIALIZATION

In the historical development of the world economy, industrialization

is one of the key processes of transformation that has occurred
in modern times. The Industrial Revolution emerged in Western
Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, and spread across the
globe (albeit unevenly). While economic historians have of course
much to say on this, human geographers point to the fact that
industrialization was and continues to be an inherently geographical
process. Industrialization has occurred in specific places in a series of
sporadic phases or ‘Kondratieff cycles’ (see box), which have been
argued to be associated with a particular set of new kinds of tech-
nologies and their associated industries. During the 19th century,
industry developed at the level of sub-national regions with certain
regions becoming specialized in particular industries. Early eco-
nomic geography was (almost exclusively) concerned with this
spatial agglomeration of industry within regions. The first wave of
industrialization occurred in Britain at the end of the 18th and the
beginning of the 19th centuries and was based around the cotton,
iron-smelting and coal industries. It occurred in the West Midlands,
Lancashire, Yorkshire, the north-east of England and southern
Scotland. These British regions maintained their success during a
second wave from the mid-19th century, but industrialization
spread to new areas and beyond Britain to continental Europe:
southern Belgium, the German Ruhr and parts of northern
France. There was also rapid industrialization in the north-east of
the US. By 1890, a further geographical expansion of industrializa-
tion occurred across central Europe and into new countries: Italy,
Austria, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and, in the far east, Japan.

KONDRATIEFF CYCLES
Economic geographers have made extensive use of theories that
seek to understand how capitalism is a dynamic economic system
characterized by periods of rapid growth and rapid decline. Foremost
in this is the idea of the economic cycle named after the Soviet
economist who first identified it in the 1920s. Nikolai Kondratieff
(1892–1938) argued that phases of growth and contraction had been
evident since the beginnings of the modern capitalist world economy
94 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

in the 18th century. These cycles were of 50–60 years’ duration and
associated with the development (i.e. the ‘invention’) of a particular
kind of technology. The first Kondratieff cycle involved early forms of
mechanization based on water power and, slightly later, steam
engines; it began in the 1770s. The focus was on cotton textiles, iron
and coal industries. A second wave spanned the period 1840 to
1890, still based on coal, but now around the iron and steel indus-
tries, heavy engineering, shipbuilding and the development of the
railways. The third Kondratieff wave is argued to be apparent in a
phase from the late 1880s to the 1920s, associated with new indus-
tries surrounding automobiles, oil, plastics and heavy chemicals. It is
at this point that British dominance diminishes as the US and
Germany become the leading nations in this wave. A fourth wave
then corresponds to the period from the 1930s to the 1970s, centred
on the emergence of the ‘knowledge economy’ industries: informa-
tion technologies, telecommunications, jet travel and biotechnology.
Clearly, however, both the timing and characteristics of Kondratieff
waves are debatable. Some argue, for example, that the computer
revolution along with the emergence of the internet represents part
of a fifth Kondratieff cycle. However, whatever periodization or char-
acterization is used, the broad theory has been widely utilized within
geography, and is particularly linked by economic geographers to the
geographical unevenness of economies and the rise and fall of
urban, regional and national economic spaces.

In the 20th century, the next wave of industrialization was based

around different kinds of industries associated with the emergence
of mass-produced consumer goods. One of the most significant and
discussed industries here is the automobile industry. Companies
such as Ford were founded and dominated the economies of certain
regions – the north-eastern area of the US from New York, Boston
on the coast to Chicago and Milwaukee on the western side of the
Great Lakes. However, in what is sometimes considered to be a
fifth wave of industrialization based around high technology
industries since the Second World War, new regions have come to
the fore that are not necessarily those that were industrialized in the
mass manufacturing wave, such as the Silicon Valley region of
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 95

California on the basis of computers and software. Conversely, just

because a region became industrialized around one wave and one
particular set of industries does not necessarily mean it will not
experience successive industrialization processes.
Historically, therefore, the process of industrialization was extre-
mely spatially concentrated with certain regions experiencing rapid
economic growth as industry emerged while others saw very little.
In Europe, for example, Spain and Portugal experienced virtually
no industrialization in the 19th century, as was also the case with
eastern Europe and Russia. Indeed, although industrialization spread
beyond its original areas in the Europe and North America, large areas
of the planet remain with significant industry for much of the 20th
century. It is only since the later 20th and early 21st centuries (as the
discussion of economic globalization in Chapter 2 describes) that
industrialization has become a planet-wide process with formerly
developing countries in the global South experiencing extensive
industrialization. Today, for example, similar uneven patterns of regio-
nal industrialization are evident across the economies of Asia as China
and other economies continue to experience rapid industrial
growth. Over the last decade, the pace of industrialization in China
in particular has been breathtaking. The Chinese economy grew on
average around 8 per cent between 2000 and 2010, and in that last
year overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.
By 2040, if this pace of industrial-led growth continues, China will
overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy. And this
rate of growth is not exclusive to China. India has a similar rate of
economic growth and ongoing industrialization, and the Asian
economies will account for two thirds of all global output by 2020.
Yet while new regional concentrations of industry bring pros-
perity, as they have for the last two centuries, in the dynamic
capitalist world economy it is also clear that regional economies do
not necessarily maintain this success indefinitely. There is a darker
side to industrialization in the form of its opposite, mirror process:
deindustrialization.

DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

One of the major concerns of human geography since the 1970s

has been the geography of deindustrialization across the economies
96 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

of the global North, and in particular the economic, social, cultural

and political impacts of this process on people’s lives. The concept
refers to the decline of industries and their gradual disappearance
from regions and other localities. As with industrialization, it has to
happen ‘in place’ and geographers have been particularly interested
in the factors that have shaped the unevenness of deindustrialization
between regions.
While some of the earliest industrial regions experienced partial
deindustrialization from the late 19th century, it is in the period
since the 1960s (in the fifth Kondratieff wave) that deindustrialization
has been a prevalent process. By the later 1960s, many of the
regional economies in the global North dominated by manu-
facturing and heavy industries (for example, shipbuilding and heavy
engineering) were experiencing industrial decline. The factors
behind this were competition from new areas of the world (such as
the already growing economies of Asia), overproduction and a fall
in demand for the goods being produced. This produced high levels of
unemployment, poverty and dereliction of industrial areas (abandoned
factories and other facilities). The West Midlands region in Britain,
for example, experienced a loss of more than half a million jobs in
manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s (Bryson and Henry 2005).
Similarly, that band of the north-eastern United States from New
York to Chicago became increasingly known as the ‘rustbelt’ by
the 1980s, as heavier industries and manufacturing experienced sig-
nificant decline. Places that had experienced the dramatic benefits
of earlier industrialization now faced substantial problems: high
unemployment, rising crime, urban decay and out-migration.

THE DECLINE OF DETROIT

In the late 1950s, the city of Detroit in Michigan gave birth to a new
type of pop music known as ‘Motown’. The Motown record label,
founded in 1960, propelled acts such as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye
and the Jackson 5 to fame and fortune. But in fact the name
‘Motown’ comes from Detroit’s nickname, ‘Motor City’, because by
that period the city had already become known as the home of the
US automobile industry.
For most of the 20th century, Detroit was dominated by the car
firms that were based there: Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 97

However, by the 1980s, increasing competition in car-making from

elsewhere in the global economy – along with new robotic manu-
facturing techniques – led to a crisis for Detroit. Car manufacturing
declined, with many former car workers made unemployed, along
with many more in related supplier industries. The home of Motown
became increasingly known for new and less happy reasons: rising
crime, social problems and urban dereliction. People abandoned
Detroit and moved elsewhere in the US in search of work.
Despite various attempts by the city and national government to
regenerate Detroit, deindustrialization has continued into the 21st
century. The automobile firms are still there, although General
Motors nearly collapsed in the recession of 2009 and Chrysler is
now owned by the Italian firm Fiat. However, they employ far fewer
people than they used to. Detroit has also struggled to attract the
new industries that are now producing growth in the US economy
around informational technologies, biotechnology, software and
other service industries. In 2011, Detroit still has one of the highest
levels of empty and vacant houses and other real estate that no one
wants to buy.

A central problem is that new industries have emerged in different

regions (the so-called ‘new industrial spaces’) in the economies of the
global North from the old industrial regions. In the US, newer high
technology industries have been concentrated in California and in the
region around Boston in the far north-east. In Europe, new industrial
spaces have also been in different regions to those experiencing dein-
dustrialization – in Britain as the West Midlands has deindustrialized,
the south-east region has seen the growth of new industries. In
Germany again, the northern areas of the Ruhr have experienced
deindustrialization while the southern Baden-Württemberg
region has been the area of new industrial growth in recent decades.
Geographers argue that this unevenness in the pattern of indus-
trialization and deindustrialization is not random or accidental. Part
of the reason older industrial regions do not experience new
industrialization is because of the barriers created by the presence of
existing industry. This is captured in the idea of regional ‘lock-in’
or ‘path-dependency’. In short, the problem is that old factories and
98 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

industrial facilities that are concentrated in a region are not suited to

new uses, and the workforce in that region has the skills suited to
the old industries rather than new industries. The automobile fac-
tories around Detroit and the workers who work in them are not
suited to the software or biotechnology industries. The point is that
the geographical concentration of industries within certain regions
makes those economies inflexible and unable to adapt easily to the
needs of new industries (whether in terms of production facilities or
the labour force that lives there). To understand the reasons for this
in more depth, we now need to consider how economic geo-
graphers have theorized the nature of this concentration of firms in
an industry within regions, and also one of the key issues that affect
whether or not industries succeed within a region: the ability to
innovate and compete in the global economy.

AGGLOMERATION AND CLUSTERS

The issue of the spatial concentration (agglomeration) of firms and

industries within regions (and particular places in those regions) is
one of the biggest debates in the sub-disciplinary area of economic
geography. The idea is longstanding, dating back to the work of the
late-nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall (1842–1924).
His argument was that those specialized industrial districts in dif-
ferent regions of Britain created by the industrialization discussed in
the last section had a distinctive ‘industrial atmosphere’ and also
benefited from what are known as agglomeration economies: the
presence of skilled labour, dedicated infrastructure (for example,
transport facilities) and the support of specialist input industries (an
example would be the presence of firms in the region supplying
specialist components). All of these factors essentially reduce the costs
of producing goods and services to firms. However, since the late
1980s, geographers have revisited and developed many of these ideas.
Central to this revival of interest in agglomeration is the extension of
arguments about its benefits beyond the reduction of costs to other
kinds of advantages. Geographers now argue that industry agglomera-
tion is important in terms of all kinds of benefits linked with learning
and innovation (Malmberg and Maskell 2002). We will return to
this issue shortly, but first we need to think about the most
dominant concept of economic agglomeration: the cluster.
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 99

While obviously a geographical idea, the most influential theory

on business clusters in (economic) geography comes from the work
of a Harvard economist, Michael Porter. In several books that have
been very influential among policy makers, Porter argues that
clusters within regional economies are the major basis for prosperity
and competitiveness in today’s global economy (Porter 1998). There
are essentially three reasons for this, related to geographical con-
centration: increased productivity, greater innovation and higher
rates of new firm creation within the cluster. All three make indi-
vidual firms and the cluster overall more competitive in global
markets. Porter’s model contends that the clustering effect enhances
competitiveness based on four main factors. First, successful clusters
tend to serve global markets and thus import innovation into the
cluster from demand in the wider global economy. Second, the
cluster has close linkages between firms and suppliers or supporting
firms that enable complex communication and interaction. Third,
competitiveness is enhanced by various inputs within a cluster being
concentrated in one region including suitably skilled labour or readily
available capital to invest in new ventures. Finally, firms’ strategy and
rivalry enhance the competitiveness of clusters because proximity
encourages new ‘spin-off’ firms to emerge in the cluster, as well
as rivalry between firms encouraging investment and innovation.
The closeness of firms in a cluster to each other (proximity) means
that competing firms can monitor each other, and this makes them
aware of new developments in their industry very quickly.
The classic example of a successful cluster is that of Silicon
Valley, already mentioned. Because a large number of computer,
software and other information technology firms are located close
together in this area, the abilities of the highly skilled workforce who
work in these firms are collectively improved and continually
updated through the provision of specialist training and education.
There are close links with universities, but also the overall innova-
tiveness of individual firms is improved by the collective benefit of
workers moving between firms in the region, talking to each other
and continually seeing for themselves what competing firms are
doing. The ‘competitiveness effect’ is thus collective, an outcome of
all these firms being close together within the region. If they were
all scattered across the United States, these collective effects would
not be present.
100 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

The point about this argument it that it applies increasingly to

firms in all industries in the global economy, not just Silicon Valley.
Whether that is the film industry in Hollywood or Bangalore in
India, the advertising industry in London’s West End or the fashion
industry in Milan, in the global economy, successful industries are
very often located in clusters of firms within specific locations.
However, while economic geography has been very much interested
in this concept of business clusters, it has also developed a critical
debate in relation to Porter’s theory and to the way it has influ-
enced government policies around the world. Geographical think-
ing, for example, has questioned the degree to which firms in many
clusters really do benefit from physical proximity in any simple
way, also arguing that the nature of clusters varies hugely between
different industries as well as between the kinds of wider societies
they are embedded within in different places. In that respect, geo-
graphers have sought to develop more sophisticated understandings
of the factors that give firms advantage through agglomeration. In
particular, much geographical work has focused on further devel-
oping theories of knowledge and innovation and on the broader
significance of what has been termed the ‘learning region’ (rather
than simply firm clusters).

KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION

Economic geographers, like other social scientists, argue that we

now live in a global economy where knowledge has become one
of the most important contributory factors to the production of
goods and services. This is what is meant by the concept of the 21st-
century global knowledge economy. If for much of the 19th and
20th centuries, firms and regions were economically successful
because they had natural resources (coal, oil, minerals) or a pool of
cheap labour, then in recent decades what has become more
important is the level of knowledge and how that knowledge is
applied and built upon. This increasing importance of knowledge is
sometimes also termed the ‘informationalization’ of the global
economy (or the global informational economy).
Geographers have therefore joined economists and management
theorists in putting much emphasis on the relationship of knowledge
to economic activity. They have become increasingly interested
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 101

in this respect in different forms of knowledge. There is an impor-

tant distinction to be made between codified knowledge, which is
formal and systematic (the kind of knowledge you find in a manual
or a textbook) and tacit knowledge, which is based around direct
experience and cannot be easily expressed in texts or documents.
Tacit knowledge is therefore more practical and represents the
‘know-how’ involved in doing something. You only have to think
about the difference between two people trying to operate an
electronic gadget such as a DVD player or games console, one by
reading the instruction manual and the other by having experience
of the gadget from repeated use. Tacit knowledge or knowing how
to operate something makes all the difference.
The role of different forms of knowledge is crucial in relation to
a key process in economic activity – innovation. In the context of
the economy, innovation is the creation of new goods and services,
and it includes the modification of existing ones. Firms in today’s world
are constantly trying to innovate in order to remain competitive and/
or increase their profits. As a process, it is evident everywhere.
Think of the latest mobile phone or piece of computer technology.
Firms such as Nokia or Dell in these industries continually alter and
amend models, incorporating new features and improvements in order
to persuade people to buy their products. Innovation also comes in
the more obvious form of product innovation (the latest Apple note-
book) and process innovation, where firms develop new ways of making
a product or delivering a service. An example of the latter is the
range of innovations the internet has produced through e-commerce.
Consider how newer, budget airlines (such as JetBlue in the US or
EasyJet in Europe) cut the cost of their fares to the minimum by
using website-based ticket sales, new staff working patterns and
more sophisticated booking systems. Such an innovation means
they have to employ fewer staff in airports and in their head offices,
which enables these companies to charge passengers less.
Economic geographers and other social scientists tended to
understand innovation as a linear process in much of the economy
until the 1990s. Such innovation happened in large companies that
had formal research and development (R&D) departments, which
employed skills engineers or scientists to develop new products in a
separate environment from the main divisions of the company that
produced its existing goods and services. However, this view has
102 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

changed over the last couple of decades with the realization that a
lot of innovation is in fact interactive in that new products and
ideas emerge from the constant cooperation, collaboration and
exchange of ideas between customers, suppliers, research organizations
(universities) and a whole range of employees in different divisions
within companies. All this is important to geographical thinking
because of the role of different kinds of spaces and of spatial
agglomeration in the processes of innovation. Much economic
geography has argued that innovation in firms is facilitated by the
proximity that agglomeration brings, and is embedded in a wider
range of factors that are specific to places (see box). Firms located in
one region are more innovative because of the collective enhancement
of learning resulting from them being close together.

EMBEDDEDNESS
This concept essentially refers to the way in which economic actors
and activity are caught up in a range of factors that in conventional
economic analysis are regarded as ‘non-economic’. Economic activity
is thus embedded because, so the argument runs, it does not exist
in isolation from a whole range of influences in wider society. This
includes social and cultural values, laws and regulations, individual
and collective behaviours as well as political circumstances. The
concept has come into economic geography via a broader interest in
a number of social science disciplines (for example, the area of eco-
nomic sociology within sociology or socioeconomics within econom-
ics). An important basis for this is the mid-20th century thinking of
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), an interdisciplinary scholar who is, broadly
speaking, an economic historian. His book The Great Transformation
(1944) provided an historical analysis of how economies are shaped
by culture and the nature of the societies in which they exist. Such a
position is highly critical of the dominant, mainstream arguments of
neoclassical economics that treat the economy and economic activity
as phenomena that can be abstracted from their socio-cultural context.
Geographical work since the 1990s has become increasingly
interested in the ways in which industries, clusters and even individual
firms are embedded in the socio-cultural context of specific places
and spaces. Geographers have become interested in different types
of embeddedness: territorial, social, institutional and so on. All of
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 103

these ideas aim to capture how firms and other economic actors are
caught up in non-economic influences. However, what has made the
concept of embeddedness especially useful is the ongoing globali-
zation of economic activity, with geographers seeking to understand
how transnational firms, global production networks and global
commodity chains are all embedded in increasingly complex ways in
multiple places (see Chapter 2). Dicken (2011) captures both the
importance and the complexity of this when he states that TNCs are
produced ‘through an intricate process of embedding, in which the
cognitive, cultural, social, political and economic characteristics of
the home country continue to play a dominant part’ but where they
also ‘inevitably take on some characteristics of their host environ-
ment’ (Dicken 2011: 122). Equally, debates regarding the nature of
clusters and of learning regions show how strongly embedded in the
many characteristics of certain places the process of innovation and
the competitiveness of firms are. Economic activity in today’s world
is not only embedded but is so in increasingly complicated ways in
multiple places and contexts simultaneously.

THE LEARNING REGION

Economic geographers have used these various theories of knowledge

and innovation to develop a broader approach to the debate about
clusters and regional agglomeration around the idea of ‘the learning
region’. At least five arguments are made in relation to this concept.
The first is that globalization does not make all places equally
attractive for economic activity, but rather leads to new forms of
agglomeration based around where knowledge can be created (Storper
1997). With the rise of new and highly effective global information and
communications technologies, codified knowledge has become
increasingly available everywhere (for example, you can download
your games console manual from the internet anywhere). However,
and second, the opposite is true of tacit knowledge, which is ‘sticky’
and remains very firmly rooted in specific places. The reason is that
tacit knowledge is something possessed by individuals that can only
really be made use of face to face when employees work together in the
same place. You cannot very easily transmit it elsewhere. What this
104 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

means for specific places is that those that can create and maintain
tacit knowledge in certain kinds of economic activities will have an
advantage over those that cannot (Maskell et al. 1998).
A third issue is that of the informal rather than formal social
practices that are involved in economic activity. Regional economies
benefit from all kinds of informal relationships and linkages between
individuals that tie firms together. The economic geographer
Michael Storper called these ‘untraded interdependencies’ (Storper
1995) that are hard to measure and that loosely correspond to the
collection of skills, attitudes, habits and shared understandings
which come about in an area where there is specialized production.
Such interdependencies are generated by, for example, groups of
people working in an industry meeting in bars and clubs, playing golf
together or socializing in chambers of commerce and trade associations.
Storper also argues that learning regions also have another similar
and hard-to-measure characteristic – what he and Anthony
Venables have called ‘local buzz’ (Storper and Venables 2004). This
is a kind of updated version of Marshall’s ‘industrial atmosphere’. It
refers to an ill-defined vibrancy and excitement in everyday life
within an industry cluster that is a consequence of many different
activities and events occurring in one place that create interesting
and potentially useful information and knowledge for economic
actors. It is very much dependent on face-to-face interaction and
the co-presence of both firms and people within an industry in the
same place (Bathelt et al. 2004). Local buzz is most easily imagined
in an urban setting. An example that geographers have studied is
the advertising, media and computer animation industry in the Soho
area of central London (Grabher 2001). The cluster exists in the
cramped and trendy narrow streets of this district, which is filled
with bars, restaurants, theatres and clubs as well as companies. Firms
benefit from just being in that place as employees meet each other,
chat, gossip and interact in all kinds of ways from eating out or
drinking in bars informally to attending industry events (the launch
of a new advertising campaign or a feature film that a firm in the
cluster has worked on).
Finally, geographical work on learning regions has emphasized
the significance of trusting relationships between firms, which is
crucial if they are to collaborate and learn collectively. The idea
here is that greater closeness between firms (physical proximity)
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 105

means they are more likely to trust each other than trust distant firms
with whom they have only periodic contact. Economic geographers
have also begun to theorize these kinds of trust at the level of
individuals. For example, in many industries, such as finance or legal
services, trust between specific senior managers (or firm partners
in the case of legal services) has been found to be crucial
(Faulconbridge 2008).

INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
Geographical analysis of economies today goes beyond scale-based
ideas of national, regional or local economies and also has a con-
siderable interest in the nature of economic activities: namely the
development of specific kinds of activities (industries) and how this
is also part of the explanation for the geographies of economies we
see in today’s world. We therefore now need to consider some of
the major ways in which geographers have contributed to an
understanding of different industries and how a geographical view-
point sheds light on the roles of different types of industries in the
global economy.

MANUFACTURING

It is one of the commonest misconceptions in some wealthier

countries in Europe and North America today that, overall manu-
facturing industries have declined. While it is true that these countries
may have experienced manufacturing industry deindustrialization,
in terms of the global economy, manufacturing output has
increased almost every year since the end of the Second World
War. What has changed dramatically at the global scale, however, is
where manufacturing goods are made, what is made, and how they
are made. Taking the issue of where manufacturing industry is located
first, the major trend has been what Peter Dicken calls his ‘global
shift’. Up until the 1970s, the vast majority of the world manu-
facturing industry was located in the global North, but increasingly
manufacturing moved to economies in Asia and Latin America. By
the early 1980s, geographers were interested in what they saw as a
new international division of labour whereby manufacturing work
was increasingly being done by workers in the global South and
106 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

other service-based jobs by those in the global North. Since then,

this geographical reconfiguration of manufacturing has become ever
more complicated as TNCs organize production through global
production networks. However, it needs to be emphasized here
that, despite this shift towards GPNs, for manufacturing production
the trend for this to be located outside the wealthier countries of
the global North has continued. Led by Japan, but now increasingly
China, Asian countries produce more and more of the world’s
manufacturing output. Lower labour costs are one of the major
factors that have led to this relocation over recent decades, although
it is increasingly also about the fact that countries such as China
have growing markets for manufactured goods. Geographers have
sought to understand the trends in this shift of manufacturing pro-
duction from the economies of the global North, and explain why
some manufacturing industries have continued to succeed in coun-
tries like France, Germany and the United States, while others have
all but disappeared. For example, Germany still has substantial
automobile and machine engineering industries, with companies
such as BMW and Bosch thriving. The British and American
automobile industries, by comparison, have suffered continual
decline both in terms of the number of people employed and the
success of firms from those countries. There are now wholly owned
British automobile manufacturing firms and the two largest US
companies – Ford and General Motors – came very close to bank-
ruptcy in the global economic downturn of 2007–9. Automobile
production, however, is still strong and growing in many Asian
and Latin American economies. Part of German automobile firms’
success, for example, is accounted for by their success in moving
into China. Volkswagen sold more than a million cars there in
2010.
Second is the issue of what is made. Over the last 50 years, the
nature of manufactured goods has changed radically. Broadly, this
has two aspects: a huge increase in the volume of manufactured
products made, and a dramatic increase in the number of different
types of product. Compared to the 1950s or 1960s, the 21st-century
global economy manufactures much more than previous periods.
This is part of the reason many manufactured goods have become
more readily available and cheaper in ‘real terms’ (that is, they cost
a smaller proportion of people’s total income than in the past).
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 107

Furthermore, there are many more different products. This includes

a huge number of manufactured goods that are simply new and
related to technological innovations of the fourth or fifth
Kondratieff. A good example would be the electronics industries,
which now produce numerous electronic consumer goods that did
not even exist 30, let alone 60, years ago. Think of CD and DVD
players, personal computers, laptops, printers, digital scanners or
mobile phone technology. Equally, however, what has also changed is
the huge increase in the various types of manufactured goods: you can
now buy hundreds (if not thousands) of models of many electronic
goods. Consumers have a vast choice compared to previous decades.
This leads us to a third issue in relation to manufacturing: the
dramatic changes in how manufactured goods are made. A large
body of work in economic geography has been concerned with the
shift to what is argued to be a new kind of more flexible manu-
facturing economy that has enabled both an increase in the volume
of production and all that diversity in manufactured products.
Geographers in the 1980s and 1990s focused much attention on the
idea that Fordist manufacturing was increasingly being replaced by
new ways of making goods that were loosely labelled ‘post-
Fordism’. Economies and societies of the global North in the mid-
twentieth century were characterized by a period known as
Fordism (named after Henry Ford who founded the Ford motor
company), which involved the mass consumption of manufactured
goods (everything from automobiles to vacuum cleaners, television
sets and refrigerators). This began in the United States in the 1920s
and 1930s, but after the Second World War it spread to Europe
and then to Australia, Japan and other economies. The peak of this
Fordist period is argued to be the 1950s and 1960s, but by the
1970s companies sought to keep up their profits by beginning to
shift to cheaper production locations in southern Europe, Latin
America and part of Asia. Importantly, however, manufacturing
firms also learnt new methods to enable them to be more flexible
with the goods they produced. By the 1980s, people were used to
manufactured goods coming in many different forms – different
colours, models and versions of a product. This required firms to
develop many kinds of flexibility in how they made goods. The classic
but probably over-used example is automobile production, where
firms began to make use of robotic assembly lines that could produce
108 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

small batches of automobiles with different features. If you buy a

BMW’s Mini today, you can specify in the showroom not only its
colour but all kinds of features – the kinds of seats, alloy wheels, a
sunroof, the type of audio equipment it has. All of this is possible
because of flexible production methods that allow firms to tailor
complex manufactured goods such as automobiles to specific
customer preferences.

SERVICES AND THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

In the last few decades, economic geographers have become

increasingly interested in the service industries. Conceptually, however,
the definition of what corresponds to the ‘service sector’ is something
of a problem. Services used to be regarded as fairly unimportant by
human geographers and other social scientists, a kind of small
additional set of economic activities that were marginal to the main
industries in the primary (oil, mineral extraction) and secondary
(manufacturing) sectors. In the second half of the 20th century, this
changed dramatically in at least three major ways.
The first was the massive growth in the size of the service sector
in most of the world’s economies. In the latter half of the 20th
century, the overall contribution of industries that are described as
services to GDP increased dramatically. For example, taking
economies in the global North such as the US and UK, the service
sector moved from accounting for 42 per cent of GDP in 1970 to
73 per cent by the year 2010. A major factor has been the devel-
opment of the global knowledge economy discussed above since
many new service industries are ‘knowledge-intensive’ and reflect
the growing need for knowledge in economic activity. However, it
is important to realize that the growth in services is neither restric-
ted to the economies of the global North nor just related to the
emergence of an increasingly knowledge-oriented economy. Some
new services are also a reflection of the growing prosperity in the
global economy and the fact that consumers can afford to pay for
services they could not previously. For example, think of the
growth in domestic cleaning businesses or other home-related services
like childcare or even dog-walking!
Another factor is the way large companies have moved away
from providing many services ‘in-house’. Car manufacturing firms
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 109

no longer have their own catering or advertising divisions as they

may have done in the 1960s or 1970s. Now they buy in these ser-
vices from other specialist companies. The dramatic growth in ser-
vices is therefore multi-dimensional and has an uneven geographical
impact. Economic geography has therefore been especially inter-
ested in the distinct differences between areas where service indus-
tries have developed and flourished and those where they have
been less evident. A key example of this is the argument that cer-
tain kinds of service industries have been central to the success and
development of global cities (as discussed in Chapter 4), but geo-
graphers are also concerned about how a poorly developed service
sector is associated with regional economies that have struggled to
create wealth and jobs in recent decades.
A second trend is the enormous diversification of activities that
come under the label of a ‘service’. There are, in short, lots of new
kinds of service industry compared to even 30 years ago. In the
21st-century global economy, the types of industries that we can call
services have multiplied many times. In the pre-Second World War
era, whole sectors – such as IT services, business consultants and
media services – simply did not exist. Moreover, there is considerable
debate among economic geographers and other social scientists as to
whether many of these industries are ‘pure’ services, or whether
they combine elements that are better defined as something else, such
as creative industries (see the next section on the ‘new economy’).
One important aspect of the diversification of services, however,
is the useful distinction between ‘producer’ (or business) services
that are provided by firms to other firms and ‘consumer’ (or retail)
services that are offered to individuals. Regarding the former,
industries such as accountancy, advertising or management con-
sultancy fall into this category (you would not buy the services of
these firms personally), whereas consumer services include a whole
range of industries from leisure firms owning gyms and cinemas to
classic services such as hairdressers. Some service industries have both
producer and consumer dimensions to them – banking, law and
insurance are classic examples of these. Geographers and other social
scientists have come up with at least seven groupings for various
service industries that now exist: finance and real estate, business,
transport and communication, wholesale and retail trades, enter-
tainment and leisure, education and health and not-for-profit
110 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

(charities, museums and galleries). Just the length of this list and the
number of types of firms and organizations it covers should give
you some idea of how huge the service sector is nowadays.
Finally, the third trend around the service sector of the global
economy is the growing importance of certain types of services to
the operation of all industries in the global economy. This brings us
back to the issue of the knowledge economy and specifically the
increasing importance of producer services. Put simply, the growing
importance of knowledge as an input into everything that is pro-
duced in the global economy means that specialist producer services
have become more important. Whether or not the aircraft com-
pany Airbus can develop and sell a new model of plane is reliant on
the inputs of many specialist firms offering services around a whole
range of areas including engineering, design, specialist recruitment,
software and marketing. Producer services are thus increasingly
involved in every other industry, and that means they can also
generate a lot of wealth in the regions and places where they are
concentrated. They have also been central to processes of economic
globalization as producer services have in effect helped transnational
firms to become transnational, and the global economy to become
more integrated (see box). We will return to this issue shortly in
consider the nature of global city networks.

THE GLOBALIZATION OF BUSINESS SERVICES

As recently as the 1970s, a number of the most important business
services – investment banking, accountancy, legal services and man-
agement consultancy – were very much based within national
economies. In the UK and Germany, for example, banking was con-
centrated in London and Frankfurt respectively, and in the US, New
York, particularly the area around Wall Street, dominated finance.
Similarly, law firms in these cities providing services to other companies
(corporate law) focused on their national markets and rarely served
client firms outside of their home economies (even if they were
dealing with investments or business deals these firms were involved
with elsewhere in the world). However, since the late 1970s, all of
these business services industries have changed dramatically and
their activities have become globalized.
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 111

Why has this happened? There are at least three major reasons.
First, the activity of these firms has been deregulated since the 1970s
(especially in finance), allowing them to do business overseas much
more easily. Second, and following on, is the logic of firms seeking to
grow and increase profits by expanding their operations into new
markets. This means offering their services to firms in countries
where they have not previously done so. UK law firms, for example,
have tried to expand into North America and Asia to offer their legal
services to firms. Finally, the globalization of these industries is tied
in with the wider general trends of economic globalization. Business
service firms help other firms in all sectors of the global economy
become more global themselves – for example, investment banks
provide the finance for European firms to invest in Asia, while man-
agement consultancy firms give advice on how to set up operations
and law firms draw up contracts to make the deals happen.

THE ‘NEW ECONOMY’ AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

One particular part of today’s global knowledge economy that has

been of great interest to human geographers is those industries that
are associated with what is termed the ‘new economy’ and that are
in some way ‘creative’. One of the reasons that geographers have
been especially interested in these industries is partly because, in
order to fully understand their development, there is a need to
explore different elements of the subject. While the above account
of the appearance of new service industries covers many aspects of
this ‘new economy’ of recent decades, not all of the industrial
activity associated with this idea fits neatly into the category of
‘services’. Many new knowledge-based industries appear to make
products rather than provide a service (or at least do both), even if
these are not material goods. These kinds of ‘creative industries’
range from more traditional industries that have evolved – such as
advertising and marketing, music and the visual and literary arts – to
more truly new activities that have only really come into existence
in recent years, such as computer games, film and television, media and
web design. They have been of significant interest to economists, busi-
ness theorists and planners because they are seen as key drivers of
economic growth (especially within urban economies), but geographers
112 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

have also done a lot of work on these sectors. They have, for exam-
ple, examined what makes successful computer games industries or
examined clusters of designer firms in the global fashion industry.
The reason for this may be the argument that a geographical
approach is especially useful in understanding the many factors that
lead to the development of these industries. Creative industries are
impossible to understand without an appreciation of cultural trans-
formations in global society. In that sense, human geographers
arguably have the edge in conceptualizing the development of these
new economic activities and creative industries over accounts in
subjects such as economics. One particular debate in this respect
shows this very well: the idea that the people who work in creative
industries are the key to economic growth in city-regions.
Geographers have been very concerned here with the work of the
US policy commentator Richard Florida, who argues that, in the
global economy, city-regions succeed if they can attract the skilled
workers who are employed in creative industries (Florida 2002).
This new ‘creative class’ includes not only artists and musicians but
all kinds of jobs in fashion, media, marketing and so on. One of the
arguments is that these creative industries cluster in attractive city
environments that people in this creative class work in, which also
links to ideas about clusters and ‘local buzz’ discussed earlier. Human
geography is in a particularly strong position to understand the nature
and significance of creative industries since success or failure of this
kind of economic activity is seen as being bound up with cultural
and place-related issues that are normally outside the concern of
economists or business theorists. Geographers have investigated the
extent to which the characteristics of certain places influence the
concentration of creative workers and industries, and examined how
policymakers might seek to attract these kinds of people. These issues
are also related to a geographical approach to understanding the
changing role of cities in today’s world, which we will explore shortly,
and are especially good examples of how the boundaries between
‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ geography are very much blurred.

AGRICULTURE AND FOOD

A fourth and final group of industries that geographical work has

been concerned with provides a contrasting example of the way in
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 113

which the interdisciplinary nature of human geography is helpful in

understanding the complex changes in today’s global economy. In
the case of agriculture and food production, dramatic changes to the
actors responsible for producing food together with the way these
industries are organized has brought huge changes and challenges to
the landscapes and environments that people around the world live
in. Equally, as we mentioned when considering consumption in the
previous chapter, geographical work sees the issue of food produc-
tion as very closely tied to questions of consumption. As Brian
Ilbery and Damian Maye (2008) put it neatly, ‘food is a geographical
topic’. We could argue that it is becoming ever more so as globa-
lization processes further transform the way in which the agricultural
industry produces foods, and what foods people around the globe
are able and wish to eat. There is therefore a large body of work on
food within human geography, but three major aspects of
geographical work on agriculture and food are worth highlighting.
First, in terms of agriculture and food production as an industry,
a geographical approach is very much interested in where and how
food is produced and the complex system by which it is transported
and sold to people to consume (through retail). Economic geo-
graphers are thus very concerned to map the increasingly complex
global food chains or networks of food production and distribution
that involve transnational agricultural firms and food retailers
(supermarkets). The concept of the global food chain traces the
multiple connections to different places of production for food and
agricultural commodities. An example would be to think how the
food you buy in fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s or
Kentucky Fried Chicken has been produced in different places, and
how it is stored and distributed through networks of outlets in an
economy until you consume it. Another example is, of course, the
global food chains increasingly controlled by the transnational food
retailers discussed in Chapter 2. One of the major developments
geographers have been concerned with is the push to make food
chains more sustainable. A burger restaurant in Europe could be
selling burgers made from beef flown from Argentina or Brazil in
South America, along with fresh produce such as lettuce or toma-
toes that have also been air-freighted from other tropical countries.
An understanding of the geography of the food chain therefore
allows an assessment of the impact on the environment of certain
114 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

ways of producing and distributing food (in terms of carbon

emissions into the atmosphere in this example).
Another second aspect of geographical interest in agriculture and
food is also the social impact of changing food production. With
the increasing power and dominance of TNCs in food retailing and
agriculture in countries of both the global North and global South
in the 21st century, geographers have been concerned with the dramatic
changes of livelihood that occur as traditional rural ways of living
disappear. Small farmers are being replaced by industrial agriculture
across the world, and transnational firms also increasingly dominate
through their use of specialist seeds. Furthermore animal species
have been developed that have led to an increase in the amount of
food that can be produced in a given area of land. At the other end
of the food chain, the transnational food retailers such as Walmart,
Tesco and Carrefour that we discussed in Chapter 2 have increasing
power in the marketplace for foodstuffs that often also further drives
the shift to large-scale agriculture. Geographers have been interested
in the responses to these changes including, for example, attempts to
protect small food producers in the global South through cooperation
and alternative food networks. Examples of this would include
global initiatives to develop fair trade in places where for a long
time poor farmers in the global South producing commodities like
tea, coffee, sugar and cotton have received very low prices.
Finally, as mentioned already, the changing nature of the consump-
tion of food has been of great concern in cultural geography. The
changing nature of food consumption is in part the result of many fac-
tors over the last 50 or 60 years, including changing methods of food
production and distribution, as well as social and cultural transformation
in many regions of the globe. Cultural globalization has exposed many
people to new kinds of food, and economic globalization has
enabled foods to be distributed to places where they were never
previously available. These processes mean, for example, that a wide
variety of cuisines are increasingly available everywhere on the
planet. You can now as easily eat American, Italian or French food in
Tokyo or Beijing as you can find Japanese or Chinese food in Europe
or the Americas. While this globalization of food has been going on
for centuries, in today’s world it has become much more highly
developed. Cultural geographers have naturally been very con-
cerned with understanding how representations of places and cultures
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 115

are bound up with different cuisines and foodstuffs, and how these are
changing and developing in the globalized world we now live in.

CITIES
The majority of people in the world today live in cities or places
that would be described as ‘urban’. In the richer countries of the
global North, it is estimated that more than 70 per cent of people
live in urban areas and the developing countries in the global South
are rapidly catching up with this figure: the comparable figure is
already 60 per cent. Human geographers have long been interested
in cities, so much so that – as discussed in the Introduction – there
is a whole sub-discipline of ‘urban geography’ within the subject.
Yet defining a city is itself tricky. Cities come in all shapes and sizes,
and have very different make-ups, in terms of who lives in them.
Geographers broadly have made use of a series of criteria for
defining an area as urban based on the size and density of the
population living in a particular place, how permanent the settle-
ment is and how diverse it is in terms of the types of people living
there (Cochrane 2008). The problem remains, however, that the
nature of cities in today’s world remains very diverse. Cities in the
global South, for example, such as Mumbai, Mexico City or Lagos
have very different social structures, physical forms and urban poli-
tics from those of many cities in Europe or North America.
Generalizing about cities is therefore difficult despite the fact that in
the second decade of the 21st century, urban geographies are
becoming ever more significant not only because more and more of
the world’s population live in urban places, but also because cities
are increasingly the key places where many issues facing the world
today come together. Whether because of the fact that ‘global
cities’ are increasingly the main places where global economic activity
is organized (Sassen 2001), or because of the need to develop sustain-
able ways of city living in a low-carbon future (Betsill and Bulkeley
2005), urban spaces are now the key places.

URBANIZATION AND URBAN FORM

The concept of urbanization refers simply to the way in which

cities have grown as more and more people have moved to live in
116 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

them. Throughout most of the last couple of centuries, urbaniza-

tion has continued at a steady pace. Cities in the year 2000 were
more numerous, had bigger populations and covered more land
than they did in 1900. The same is true of the previous 100 years if
you look back to 1800. This process, however, has not always been
either uniform or consistent for all cities in all parts of the world. In
the wealthier regions of the global North, large cities in the late
20th century did also experience decline and an opposite process of
counterurbanization. However, for the most part, it is urbanization
processes that have been dominant.
Both urbanization and counterurbanization are of course inher-
ently geographical phenomena insofar as they generally involve the
movement of people to live in cities (see also the section on
migration in the next chapter), and the physical growth of cities in
terms of land area. Of equal interest to geographers, however, is the
wider question of how cities expand into new territorial space, as
well as how they change over time. Geographers have therefore a
longstanding interest in urban form – that is, the physical structure
of how cities are laid out, where buildings are located, what kinds
of buildings are in particular areas of cities and what factors have
shaped this. In the earlier 20th century, urban geographers were
involved in the development of models of how cities had devel-
oped in order to understand how different areas of a city have dif-
ferent uses. One of the classic models in urban geography was
proposed by the American sociologist Ernest Burgess (1886–1966)
in 1925, based on his work on the city of Chicago at the time.
Burgess famously argued that land use in the city was organized
around concentric zones of usage, with the central business district
in the centre and various old or new industrial or residential areas
further out (see Figure 5.1).
While historically specific and simplistic models such as this
formed the basis for many attempts by urban geographers to
understand the form of cities, the sub-discipline remains closely
concerned with how different areas of cities gain or lose certain
land-use characteristics. In the last 60 years, major debates in this
respect have been concerned with how deindustrialization, flex-
ibilization (Fordism to post-Fordism), informationalization and
globalization have affected urban form. These are enormous debates
in and of themselves, but we can briefly identify at least two
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 117

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Figure 5.1 Burgess’s concentric zone model of urban land use

overlapping features of changing urban form that have concerned

geographers.
In relation to economic change, there has been a shift away from
the urban form associated with the heyday of Fordist manufacturing
in the 1950s and 1960s. Many cities in the global North have
experienced an ongoing suburbanization that entails their sprawling
over large areas of land and leads to the dilution of clear land use in
different parts of cities. Suburbs today in many cities in America,
Australia and Asia contain many land uses mixed up together –
residential, retail, industrial – reducing the significance of the central
area. This mixing up of city form is sometimes referred to as the
emergence of ‘edge cities’ because these suburbs contain everything
118 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

you would normally expect to find in a city, albeit in a very spread-out

form (Soja 2000).
A second set of changes to urban form that has concerned geo-
graphers relates to the globalization of cities and their increasingly
interlinkage into global city networks. Changing urban form in
many cities is a consequence of the relationship a city or area of a
city has (or does not have) with the global economy. The construction
of new central business district areas (an example would be the
Canary Wharf area in London) or the gentrification of old poor
housing neighbourhoods over recent decades (this applies to areas
of both London and New York) is linked to the office space needs
of transnational firms and to the higher incomes of specialized service
industry employees respectively (Hamnett 2003). Equally, urban
geographers have also pointed to how globalization is creating areas
of cities in the global North that look much like districts that used
to be associated with cities in the global South. Wandering along
the street markets of east London or the Chinatown districts of
many American cities, it is increasingly hard to distinguish the form
and character of these areas from the types of urban spaces that may
be encountered in Asian cities such as Hong Kong or Bangkok. To
understand such changes in urban form, we need to consider the
forces behind such change. This brings us to the concept of urban
systems.

URBAN SYSTEMS AND GLOBAL CITY NETWORKS

Historically, the origins of trying to understand cities as part of

urban systems relates to the way in which urban geographers sought
to classify different types of cities within different countries and
nation-states. Such an approach established that larger cities played a
more important role than smaller ones within regions and countries.
Within human geography, this theory of ‘central places’ was first
developed in the 1930s by the German geographer Walter
Christaller mentioned in the Introduction (see Figure 5.2).
Central place theory is based on assessing the functions fulfilled
by different urban settlements that were spread across a piece of
territory, and argued that larger towns and cities provided more
important, rarer services to the surrounding area. In the later 20th
century, and especially after the Second World War, urban
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 119

Key:

City

Town

Market town

Village

Boundaries

Central Place Theory

Figure 5.2 The size and spatial distribution of central places and their
hinterlands (after Christaller)

geographers began to develop similar kinds of theoretical arguments

in relation to the role of large cities beyond the level of nation-
states. Central place theories already provided an explanation for
why the largest cities in nation-states were the only places that were
the locations of some very specialist services and activities (such as
national government and very specialist financial, legal or medical
services), but as the world economy began to become globalized
still further, it was clear that some cities fulfilled specialized functions
at the international level.
In the 1970s and 1980s, this idea was developed into the theory
of world cities, which suggests that cities such as London or New
York were providing financial and other kinds of economic func-
tions to the world economy. However, in the 1990s, as ongoing
globalization became more apparent, a more developed version of
this kind of theory was proposed in the form of a theory of global
cities. Coined by Saskia Sassen (1991) in her book The Global City,
the original argument was that leading cities in the global economy
sat at the top of a global hierarchy of cities. Sassen identified
120 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

London, New York and Tokyo as the three globally most important
cities, arguing that they held this position because they were the
key locations where transnational firms had their head offices. In
representing the command centres for an increasingly globalized world
economy, these cities were also the only major locations for spe-
cialized business finance (i.e. investment banking and related activ-
ities) and other highly specialized producer services (corporate law
or strategic management consultancy). As we have already dis-
cussed, the drivers for these functions to be concentrated in specific
places have remained even in the era of global ICT, so these global
cities represent a form of contemporary ‘super-agglomeration’ ser-
ving the global rather than the national level.
Urban geographers and others have developed these ideas
extensively, arguing subsequently that these leading global cities are
in fact at the head of an enormous network of cities around the
planet that are interconnected as global city networks. In the
second edition of her book, Sassen herself argues that global cities
represent networked organizing hubs in the global economy of the
21st century. Geographical thinking has also been influenced by
the arguments of the sociologist Manuel Castells, who suggests that
the global city concept needs to be understood more like an (urban)
process within globalization than simply a list of places (Castells
2009). The debate about global cities therefore centres increasingly
on the issue of to what extent key functions in the global economy
exist across this urban system in a networked form as opposed to
being concentrated in a few specific ‘global cities’. In this respect,
urban geographers have evaluated both the relative importance of
different cities with respect to their role in the global economy, and
also mapped the international connections between them in order
to assess how globalized they are (Taylor 2004). An important
aspect of the global city thesis is that growing global inter-
connectedness between cities at different levels of importance
means that their physical and social structures are changing due to
global-scale influences. Cities such as London, New York or
Frankfurt are thus argued to have increasing amounts in common
with each other in terms of their labour markets and the factors that
produce economic growth, more than they do with smaller cities
within their respective nation-states (in the case of these example,
cities such as Manchester, Chicago or Hamburg respectively).
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 121

Overall, geographers are interested in understanding how every city

on Earth is increasingly bound into global-scale processes. The
danger of course is that if all cities are now ‘global cities’, to what degree
is the concept itself useful as an explanation of urban development?

THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY

One of the terms often used by urban geographers to describe cities
since the later part of the 20th century is ‘post-industrial’. In light of
our discussion of the new economy and different Kondratieff waves
of ‘industrialization’, this may seem a confusing description. Within
some geographical and other social science work, however, it is used
to refer to the nature of cities (largely in the global North) in the
aftermath of the deindustrialization that began in the 1970s.
In that sense, cities are ‘post-industrial’ (literally ‘after industry’)
insofar as they are no longer the locations of manufacturing or other
traditional industries (for example, shipbuilding). What has now
happened to many cities in the global North is in fact a diversifica-
tion of the kinds of industry that are located there. Some still have
manufacturing industries, but these represent a much smaller pro-
portion of their GDPs and employ far fewer people. Many cities are
increasingly dominated by service industries, and the wealthiest are
often those that have a high proportion of these global-level business
and financial services as well as the new creative industries dis-
cussed earlier. However, it is important to remember that human
geographers use the term ‘post-industrial city’ rather loosely in rela-
tion to not just economic but social, political and cultural features of
cities since the late 20th century. Post-industrial cities are those that
have the characteristics of a wider post-industrial society. In that
sense, the concept covers new kinds of urban forms, politics and
culture. Overall, a more accurate term might be ‘post-manufacturing
cities’ or ‘new economy-based cities’.

URBAN REGENERATION

The concept of urban regeneration stems from the idea that it is

possible to renew cities or areas of cities that have experienced
deindustrialization and its associated problems – redundant and
122 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

derelict buildings, population decline, environmental degradation,

crime and decaying infrastructure. From a historical perspective,
urban regeneration is very much an idea of the latter half of the
20th century. Its origins begin with the need to reconstruct many
of the industrial cities of the global North after the destruction of
the Second World War, but by the 1970s the question of urban
renewal had become more pressing in light of deindustrialization.
Early approaches to regeneration focused on the clearance of dere-
lict buildings and the planning of new urban environments.
However, regeneration projects from the 1950s and 1960s met with
mixed success. For example, many cities in Europe constructed
districts of high-rise residential tower blocks that reflected the
modernist architectural ideas of those decades, only to find that the
design of such buildings aggravated social problems such as crime.
In recent decades, therefore, urban regeneration has been understood
as a more wide-ranging process that needs to involve social and
political dimensions. Urban geography today is very much con-
cerned with the kind of broad definition of urban regeneration as ‘a
comprehensive and integrated vision that leads to the resolution of
urban problems’ and which ‘seeks to bring about the lasting
improvement in the economic, physical, social and environmental
condition of an area’ (Roberts and Sykes 1999).
One of the key issues, however, is the way in which urban
regeneration is undertaken in practice, and how that is shaped by
governments, private investment and local communities. The cul-
ture-led regeneration schemes that were discussed in Chapter 4 –
waterfront developments in cities such as Baltimore, Liverpool or
Bilbao – may all have been grounded in a similar set of strategies for
making these cities more attractive as places to consume, but the
manner in which regeneration was achieved varied considerably
between them. Urban geographers are thus very interested in
seeking to assess the degree to which urban regeneration projects in
today’s world are successful or not, and in providing a comparative
assessment of what are the most effective ways of achieving urban
renewal. An example would be work comparing the impact of
hosting the Olympics on different cities, widely used as a tool to
achieve urban regeneration (Rennie Short 2004). Consider how the
London 2012 Olympics have an explicit goal of regenerating the
poorer eastern part of the city, which has experienced decades of
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 123

deindustrialization. In this respect, a key factor that urban geo-

graphers have increasingly focused on is seeking to understand how
and why urban regeneration is successful is the nature of urban
politics in different cities across the globe. It therefore makes sense
to turn now to consider this issue more generally.

URBAN POLITICS

Urban geographers have made a significant contribution to wider

debates within the social sciences concerned with the importance of
urban politics. While much work within sociology, social history
and political science has focused on the nature of political move-
ments that have developed within cities, urban geography has been
particularly concerned with the spatial form and consequences of
urban political processes. Geographers see the process of urbaniza-
tion as an inherently political process that plays out across urban
spaces with uneven consequences. Central therefore to a geo-
graphical approach to urban politics is an emphasis on under-
standing how it shapes the development of cities, the global urban
system and more generally affects the nature of wider global society.
In the context of geographical theories of globalization, geographers
are becoming increasingly interested in the relationships between
the politics of cities across the planet (McCann and Ward 2011).
Several approaches to this within human geography are worth
highlighting. First, a body of work within human geography since
the 1960s has applied a Marxist approach to urban development,
and argued that cities are important spaces where social processes
such as class formation, identity formation and political conflict
occur. Urban politics in this sense is important because it shapes the
nature of wider society within nation-states and, in the 21st cen-
tury, global society. Geographers in this respect have pointed to the
way in which the spatial development of cities reflects class struggle
in capitalist societies with, for example, theoretical attempts to
understand why certain districts within cities develop as working or
capitalist class areas.
Second, much work in urban geography has examined the nature
of urban governance. In the last chapter we discussed how human
geographers have conceptualized the way a global society of
nation-states is governed, but a significant strand of work also
124 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

looks at how cities are governed and what difference that makes to
the way they develop in physical, economic and social ways. For
example, Barnett and Lowe (2004) consider how cities are impor-
tant spaces for the development of democracy and how urban pol-
itics shapes what kinds of ideas about citizenship exist in different
places (see Chapter 6). A third, related, strand of geographical work
is also interested in the key role that cities play in the geography of
political parties and new social movements. There are many exam-
ples that could be offered here, but in terms of new political
movements a good one is the new politics that have developed in
cities across the globe around developing sustainability strategies in
light of the problem of human-caused climate change. Urban sus-
tainability taps into the wider global environmental movement but
how specific strategies within different cities are developed is bound
up with the particular politics of individual cities. A geographical
approach to the question of how urban sustainability is achieved
through political processes is crucial since it is impossible to under-
stand all the factors involved without an understanding of the urban
politics that forms across many scales – from the ‘local’ level of
urban districts to that of ‘global’ environmental values and governance
(Bulkeley 2005).
Fourth, a sizeable body of work in urban geography has been
concerned with the significance of cities as places where informal
politics and new forms of political resistance develop. Cities are the
major places where political activity occurs. Think of the protests
made by political groups in the symbolic spaces of capital cities,
whether the US civil rights movement marching on the Mall in
Washington DC in the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War protests of the
1970s, or those against the Iraq War in 2003. Recent political
revolutions in the Arab world in the last decade are equally good
examples. Political resistance is intrinsically connected with urban
places and human geographers are therefore interested in how
cities are crucial places of political expression and transformation.
This also extends to the politically contested nature of the urban
built environment itself. Urban geographers are interested in how
urban planning is a politicized process, and how the built spaces of
cities become altered by the practices of the people who live in
them. Good examples would be the way in which certain urban
spaces become hijacked for different uses – pedestrian walkways and
 CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES 125

plazas being taken over by skateboarders or walls being taken over

by graffiti artists.

SUMMARY
In this chapter we have considered:

 Economic geography’s central concern with regions and regional

economies, in particular how different industries have developed
in certain regions within nation-states since the Industrial
Revolution;
 The nature of agglomeration and clustering of firms and indus-
tries in today’s global economy, and the arguments geographical
thinking offers to explain this phenomenon;
 The different forms of knowledge and how knowledge is a key
factor in understanding the nature of economic activity in the
global economy;
 How innovation is one of the most important factors shaping
economic success, and how industrial agglomeration aids inno-
vation;
 Economic geographers’ understanding of industrial develop-
ment, and how different industry sectors such as manufacturing,
services, creative industries and agriculture have changed in the
last 50 years or so;
 How geographers have developed theories to understand the
development and form of cities, urbanization as a process and
urban politics including the idea of ‘urban regeneration’;
 The emergence of an increasingly globalized urban system, and
the importance of global city networks in coordinating and
controlling the complex 21st-century global economy.

FURTHER READING
Dicken, P. (2011) Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World
Economy. London: Sage.
This book, now in its 6th edition, remains the leading reference in economic
geography for understanding industrial development, economic processes
and the complex relationships between firms, industries and economies at all
scales.
126 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Mackinnon, D. and Cumbers, A. (2011) An Introduction to Economic Geography

[2nd edition]. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Look at Chapter 4 for a detailed account of how geographers have thought
about industrial development, regions and clusters. Chapter 7 and 8 also pro-
vide good overviews of the debates surrounding the embeddedness of trans-
national firms and the service economy respectively.

Coe, N., Kelly, P. and Yeung, H. (2008) Economic Geography: A Contemporary

Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
This book provides a good account of how economic geographers have
engaged with debates about industrial development from a slightly different,
more thematic perspective. Chapter 5 is particularly useful if you are interested
in the debates regarding the relationship between technology and agglomera-
tion.

Pacione, M. (2009) Urban Geography: A Global Perspective. London: Routledge.

Provides an excellent overview of how urban geography has developed its
ideas in relation to cities and their place in today’s world. As well as providing
an historical and theoretical view, it is also strong on debates regarding the
future of cities in relation to globalization and ongoing urbanization in the
global South.

WEB RESOURCES
On global economic development, the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul
Krugman has a good website and his ideas are influential in human geo-
graphy: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/
Have a look at the website of the Globalization and World Cities group at
Loughborough University: www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY
 6

This chapter examines how human geographers approach the study

of population and changes to the composition and nature of socie-
ties including the idea of citizenship. It also addresses the movement
of people in considering migration, along with new forms of
mobility that have appeared in today’s globalized world. The final
part of the chapter then turns to think about work as it discusses the
geographies of labour.

POPULATION AND DEMOGRAPHY

The study of population (known as demography) is another topic
that has a long history in human geography. This is hardly a
surprise, however, since the ways in which human populations on
Earth change affects everything else: economy, environment, cul-
ture and politics. Human geographers have traditionally been most
interested in three issues in relation to world population: the
geographies of population growth, the factors driving this that
have led to changes in the birth rate and death rate, and the con-
sequence of population change for nation-states, regions and the
global environment.
128 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

POPULATION GROWTH

It is impossible to measure total global population accurately.

Most countries in the world today conduct a census of their
populations periodically (normally every ten years or so), and other
sources of data provide the basis for developing reasonable estimates
of population. The World Bank estimates that in 2009, the global
population had reached around 6.8 billion planet-wide, and based
on a current average growth rate of 1.2 per cent per annum, it will
double in 58 more years or so (i.e. by the year 2067). Predicting
future rates of population growth is, however, difficult. In fact, it is
widely expected that the rate of growth will decline worldwide and
that therefore the total global population will not be as high as this
figure. Nevertheless, if you consider that in 1960, the estimated
total global population was only 3 billion, you can appreciate the
significance of population growth as an issue facing the planet and
everyone on it. Many would argue that it is one of the biggest
challenges facing human society.
Historically, before the 18th century, total global population had
been growing on average only very slowly, and taking a long view
of history back to Roman times, populations in certain regions of
the world had also decreased rather than increased. However, with
the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of modern capitalist
societies, the rate of population growth increased dramatically.
Population growth during the 20th century became a more or less
global-scale norm, although certain places and regions did suffer
decline at times. It is important to realize, therefore, that much of
the growth in total population in human history is something that
happened during the 20th century. While it is true that there was
significant population growth in some of the industrial countries of
the global North in the 19th century, in the first couple of decades
of the 20th century the overall global average rate of population
growth was only around 0.5 per cent. During the 1920s, however,
this rate more than doubled at the global level to around 1 per cent
until the late 1940s. By the 1950s, there was a further increase and
the global rate of population increase reached 2 per cent per annum
by the mid-1960s. At this rate of change, the actual total global
population doubles every 35 years. Since the 1960s, however, the
growth rate has fallen back to today’s 1.2 per cent per annum, but
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 129

given that global population has already increased enormously in

absolute terms over the last century, that still produces an annual
growth of an extra 35 million people per annum. Even the most
optimistic projections for further decline in the rate of growth suggest
that planet Earth will have a population of 9 billion by around 2050.
In simple terms, growth in human population reflects a higher
rate of births than deaths. If the number of children born each year
in a given country or region exceeds the number of people that die,
then population increases. Of course, what is behind these changes
in the rate of births and deaths is the important thing to understand.
There are many factors, related to the changing nature of human
societies, economies, technology and medicine in different parts of
the world. Human geography is thus particularly concerned with
understanding the unevenness of a growing global population, what
factors are contributing in different regions and what implications
these have for societies and economies. Looking at headline figures
for global population growth reveals little about this. We therefore
need to describe some generalized features of the geography of
growth over the last two centuries.
First, in broad terms during the 19th century, population growth
was concentrated in Western Europe and a few other areas where
industrialization was taking place. It was only in the 20th century
that the populations of less developed regions grew rapidly, and
most significantly since the Second World War. A second issue is
that, since the 1950s, the rate of population growth in countries of
the global South (including the faster-developing economies of
Asia) has increased. Populations in these regions of the world have
increased from around 1 billion in 1950 to more than 5 billion
now. Conversely, the populations of the wealthier advanced
industrial economies have remained more or less stable, with little
growth. Roughly 1 billion of the Earth’s total population live in
these economies of the global North. The overall point is that
population growth over the last half century or more has mainly
occurred in the global South. Finally, it is worth noting that the
higher proportion of the growth to date has been in Asia but that
over the next 40 years it is populations in Africa rather than Asia
that are expected to increase most rapidly.
There are clearly huge implications for a continual rise in the
number of human beings on Earth. Geographers have in the past
130 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

been concerned with the obvious question of how many people

the planet can support in terms of straightforward issues of resources
(known sometimes through an ecological population term, ‘carry-
ing capacity’). At a basic level, people need food, water and shelter.
Even as recently as the mid-1960s famine in China killed more
than 20 million people and later millions more died in famines in
Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. However, modern famine is more
about the availability or production of food in a certain region than
an absolute lack of it on Earth. Most recent analyses suggest that, in
today’s era of modern industrial agriculture, the planet can produce
enough food to feed its current population and can continue to
produce more food as the population rises. However, what impact
this will have on the Earth’s environment, including its climate and
biodiversity, is worrying. Population growth, along with the
geography of where it happens, thus remains a major issue at the
centre of human geographical debates about sustainable development
We also need to think about how human geographers have made
use of various theories to understand population growth and its
relationship to wider changes in global society. In this respect,
geographers have made much use of a well-known model to
understand the way in which population change has changed
within countries as they develop: the Demographic Transition
Model (see box and Figure 6.1). It was developed in the 1920s and
is based on the historical experience of the advanced industrial
countries in the global North. The model provides a means of
understanding how the timing of changes to the birth and death
rates is related to the rate of population growth. In essence it sug-
gests that as countries industrialize and become modernized they at
first experience a period of rapid population growth before this
slows down and the level of population becomes stable (as it is in
many advanced industrial countries today). However, human
geographers have reassessed the validity of this model as a way of
understanding how less developed countries in the world today
experience population change. Geographical work has put much
effort into understanding how demographic transition has varied
and continues to vary between different countries in the global
South, and looks for a more sophisticated understanding of the
many factors that affect population change than are captured by this
model.
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 131

THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION MODEL

One of the most influential ideas about the relationship between
development and population in human geography is known as the
Demographic Transition Model. Developed in 1929 by an American
demographer, Warren Thompson, it describes five stages of a rela-
tionship between the total population and its level of economic (and
social) development based on changes in the birth rate and death
rate. The model is based on observations of changes to these rates
over a 200-year period in Western societies as they experienced
industrialization. It describes three main stages that countries have
passed through in their demographic histories (see Figure 6.1).
In stage one, a country has both a high birth rate and a high death
rate. Health care is basic and people die of diseases that could be
easily cured by today’s medical standards. People have a lot of chil-
dren and large families are the norm to ensure enough children
survive long enough to look after their parents in old age. With both
the birth and death rate relatively high, population does not increase
much during this stage. For Western countries, this stage corresponds
to the period prior to the development of industrial society in the
19th century.
Stage two of the model is characterized by a declining death rate
as sanitation and medicine improve as a country develops. Fewer
people die from easily curable diseases. However, in this stage, the
birth rate remains high, perhaps for cultural reasons or because eco-
nomic growth means there is demand for more labour. The important
point is that in this stage rapid population growth occurs, caused by
the gap between the birth and death rates. In the real world, many
developing countries experienced this kind of situation at some point
during the 20th century.
The third stage of the model sees birth rates begin to fall towards
the level of the lower death rate. In this stage, population is still
rising but at a slower rate than in stage two. The reasons for this are
multiple. To begin with, increased economic prosperity among the
population in a country along with the development of modern pension
systems means people have to rely less on their children to support
them in old age. Also important is increased urbanization, since
people in cities have less space in which to bring up large families.
In addition, however, the declining birth rate is attributed to a range
132 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

of broader societal reasons: women have greater educational and

employment opportunities, the increased availability of contraception,
the fact that many women have their first child later in life and changing
cultural attitudes that mean having a large number of children is no
longer seen as the norm.
These latter factors produce the later fourth stage of the model,
which is argued to be that typical of most advanced industrial coun-
tries since at least the mid-20th century: both a low birth rate and a
low death rate, which results in a stable level of population within a
country. In some developed countries, however, birth rates have
fallen below death rates, which leads to a situation of population
decline over time (see the section on geographical variations and
population crises below).

GEOGRAPHICAL VARIATIONS AND POPULATION CRISES

Aside from the question of growth, work within population geo-

graphy has also been concerned with a range of geographical var-
iations in population between different states and regions. Much of
this is concerned with the factors that shape existing differences in
the structure and composition of populations in different countries,
and the impact of these population structures on future social and
economic development. There is only space here to discuss a few
examples from a large body of work within human geography, but
at least two are worth highlighting.
Regarding variations in population structure first, different
countries around the world have different demographic structures
in terms of, for example, the proportion of their populations in
different age groupings or the proportion of men to women in dif-
ferent age groupings. These can be seen in the population ‘pyramid’
graphs shown in Figure 6.2, which reveal a country’s demographic
structure. While providing some useful generalizations, the apparent
‘stage’ of a country’s population in the demographic transition
model provides only a limited understanding of actual demographic
structure. For example, some countries or regions have a high
proportion of young people, or an underrepresentation of men of
working age. In particular, within many countries these factors vary
 Stage 1. 2. 3. 4. 5?
High Early Late Low Declining?
stationary expanding expanding stationary

Birth rate
40 ?

Death rate
30

Natural
20 increase Natural
Total decrease
population ?
10

Birth and death rates

(per 1000 people per year)
?
0
Examples A few remote Chad, Laos, Mexico, India, USA Australia, Japan,
traditional Afghanistan South Africa most of Europe Netherlands,
communities
Birth rate High High Falling Low Very low
Death rate High Falls rapidly Falls more slowly Low Low
Natural Stable or slow Very rapidly Increase Stable or slow Slow
increase increase increase slows down increase decrease

Figure 6.1 The demographic transition model

134 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Nigeria 2010
100+
95 – 99
Male 90 – 94 Female
85 – 89
80 – 84
75 – 79
70 – 74
65 – 69
60 – 64
55 – 59
50 – 54
45 – 49
40 – 44
35 – 39
30 – 34
25 – 29
20 – 24
15 – 19
10 – 14
5–9
0–4
15 12 9 6 3 0 0 3 6 9 12 15
Population (in millions)

United States 2010

100+
95 – 99
Male 90 – 94 Female
85 – 89
80 – 84
75 – 79
70 – 74
65 – 69
60 – 64
55 – 59
50 – 54
45 – 49
40 – 44
35 – 39
30 – 34
25 – 29
20 – 24
15 – 19
10 – 14
5–9
0–4
15 12 9 6 3 0 0 3 6 9 12 15
Population (in millions)

Figure 6.2 Population pyramids of a developed and a developing country.

Source: US Census Bureau

substantially between different ethnic groups within the total

population. In that sense, there are usually country- and region-
specific factors behind differences in population structure that need
examining in more depth. Religious or cultural contexts, for
example, can be a factor, or the inward or outward migration
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 135

of certain groups within the population. Such differences have

significant impacts on real economies and on the nature of societies
and place.
Human geographers are thus often concerned with digging into
the complexity of population structures within a country that
provides some indication of likely future changes and issues in
relation to population change. Many countries in the global North,
for example, have a growing proportion of young people in certain
ethnic groups. In Western European countries such as the UK and
France, a higher proportion of young people are from ethnic
communities as a result of colonization in Asia and the Middle East.
(We will discuss the issue of migration in more detail shortly.) The
growing representation of young people in these ethnic groups
within these populations reflects several decades of a higher birth
rate among these groups within the country’s population. Similarly,
the US has a growing proportion of younger people of Hispanic
ethnicity reflecting decades of in-migration from Mexico and other
Latin American countries. Over time, this is likely to have several
effects in terms of increasing cultural diversity within a country or
affecting the nature of domestic politics. In that sense, a geo-
graphical understanding of the diversity of population structures and
of future changes to those structures provides an important basis for
an understanding of the major forces shaping different societies
around the world.
Also, population geographers have been very much concerned
with population crises facing certain countries in the world. One
important example that has received a lot of geographical attention
is the impact of HIV/AIDS on many countries within Africa. The
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can lead to acquired
immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), was first identified in the
mid-1980s. The disease is still without a complete cure, although a
range of drugs have been developed which inhibit its development.
Importantly, however, the impact of HIV/AIDS on the global
population has been highly uneven within some regions over the
last few decades. In sub-Saharan African countries in particular, the
effect of HIV/AIDS on populations has been dramatic. Consider
that, for many countries in Western Europe, rates of HIV infection
have never exceeded 1 per cent of the population and contrast that
with some countries in Africa that have seen infection rates of over
136 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

20 per cent and as high as 50 per cent in the last two decades –
countries such as Botswana and Zimbabwe. There are multiple
reasons for this but some important factors are: the high cost of
the drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS, which were unaffordable in the
low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa; the lack of resources
to educate people on the danger; as well as societal factors such as
the position of women in traditional African societies.

THE AIDS CRISIS IN BOTSWANA

Until the mid-1980s, the southern African country of Botswana was
one of the more successful developing countries in terms of
increasing life expectancy and the health of its population. Botswana
had seen its life expectancy rise during the 20th century to around
65 years by the mid-1980s. However, the impact of HIV/AIDS on the
population in the last 30 years or so has been traumatic. HIV/AIDS had
reduced life expectancy in Botswana to 34 years by 2006, with the death
rate exceeding the birth rate. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 children
have lost one parent to the disease in the country at present (UN AIDS
2010). Since 2005, the government, with other aid agencies, has run
an increasingly successful prevention and treatment programme but
the situation still represents a population crisis. With the death rate still
exceeding the birth rate, Botswana has a shrinking total population.
Socially and economically the impact of HIV/AIDS has also been devas-
tating. There is a shrinking workforce to support economic activity, and
generations of young people grow up without both parents.

While in recent years some sub-Saharan African countries have

been successful in reducing rates of infection, in 2010 it was esti-
mated that there are still around 23 million people are living in the
region with HIV/AIDS, with 1.8 million becoming infected and
1.3 million people dying of the disease in 2009. In the last two decades,
it is no exaggeration to state that this has produced population crises in
some countries (see box on AIDS in Botswana).
However, the nature of population crises is not restricted to the
more dramatic effects of diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Some population
crises have less obvious causes than disease and are bound up with
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 137

multiple factors that are having – and are likely to continue to have – a
significant impact on countries and regions around the world.
Examples that concern human geographers are the impact of ageing
populations on the future economic and social viability of different
countries and regions (see box on ageing in the global North) or the
impact of significant inward or outward migration of certain groups
within populations (such as people of working age) from or to different
countries. Any demographic transformation that leads to an imbalanced
population structure can have significant negative consequences for
a society, whether in terms of prosperity, the continued reproduction
of the population or equally in cultural and political terms.

A CRISIS OF AGEING IN THE GLOBAL NORTH?

Human geographers have been particularly interested in one of the
big population challenges facing the wealthier countries in the global
North – populations that are getting older. An ageing population is
a characteristic of countries in the late stage of the demographic
transition model where birth and death rates have converged, with in
some cases the birth rate dropping below the death rate. Over the
last couple of decades, this trend is evident in the UK, France,
the Netherlands, Scandinavia and also in Japan. The consequence in
this situation is that the average age of the population increases,
with fewer and fewer children being born.
Consider for example the situation in Japan, which is currently the
fastest-ageing country on Earth. It is estimated that by 2020 there
will be three people of pensionable age in the population for every
child, and even before then, one in six people will be over the age of
80. Furthermore, within a few years if the current trend continues,
Japan’s population will be shrinking by around 1 million people per
year. Such a situation presents a range of very serious problems for
Japanese society and the economy, as it does in other parts of the
global North: too few people of working age to keep the economy
productive as well as the growing burden on healthcare and pension
systems. The problems of an ageing population can of course be
addressed through the in-migration of younger people into a country
or region, but given the politicized nature of immigration this is not
always an easy or unproblematic solution.
138 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

CITIZENSHIP

Almost everyone on the planet in the world of the 21st century is

(notionally at least) a citizen of one nation-state or another.
Defining citizenship is straightforward from the perspective of
political science: ‘The terms of membership of a political unit
[usually a nation-state] which secures certain rights and privileges to
those who fulfil certain obligations’ (Smith 2009). Understandings
of citizenship often identify in particular three forms of rights that
citizens have: civil or legal (for example, freedom of speech, assem-
bly, movement), political (voting, holding political office) and social
(entitlement to social security and state benefits) (Muir 1997).
Importantly, it is essentially a conception of the conditions for
membership, participation and rights in a community that is asso-
ciated with a given territory (Smith 2009). This last point is the crucial
reason why human geographers have been so interested in the
concept, since an individual has to be a citizen of a given place.
Furthermore, that community to which they belong or participate
in is situated in a certain place. It is an inherently geographical idea.
It is very likely therefore that as you read this you are a citizen of
a country. You will either have a passport issued by that country or
the right to receive one, and you are governed by that country’s
laws and requirements. As a citizen, you are also probably a political
participant in your nation-state’s existence. In much of the world,
that means voting in elections, but even in non-democratic coun-
tries where not everyone (or anyone) votes, citizens may have to be
part of political institutions or governing organizations. Many
countries require citizens to provide certain services to the nation-
state – some demand that young people undertake a period of
military or civic service and many require their citizens to volunteer
their time to serve as jurors in the judicial system. Conversely,
nation-states have a responsibility to look after and attend to the
needs of their citizens – most notably to protect them. Citizenship
is therefore a conceptual relationship of membership between
individual people and a nation-state.
Interestingly, the universality (if not consistency) of the concept
that nation-states are composed (in human terms) of citizens means
that in the 21st-century global political system we live in, ideas of
citizenship are reinforced at the supranational scale. International
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 139

law and institutions such as the United Nations ensure the concept
of citizenship exists above the scale of nation-states. This is in the
background of international politics for much of the time but
becomes clearly visible around the global politics of war and con-
flicts in today’s world. When nation-states enter into civil war or
act in a totalitarian manner, international actions by the UN or
military organizations such as NATO are often justified by and
grounded in arguments concerning the abuse by a state of its citi-
zens. Examples would include military interventions in the
Yugoslav war of the 1990s, the 2003 war in Iraq and the NATO
intervention in the civil war in Libya in 2011. In this way, there is a
developing concept of global citizenship that sees individuals with
rights and responsibilities as global citizens beyond their relationship
with any given nation-state.
Human geographers have become increasing interested in the last
issue, but more widely there is a lot of geographical work con-
cerned with differences between concepts and practices of citizen-
ship in different parts of the world. Much work has also in
particular focused on what has been termed the ‘spaces of citizen-
ship’, with geographers pointing out that the spaces of citizenship
within nation-states are not ‘straightforwardly inclusionary’ (Painter
and Philo 1995). In fact, whilst the language of citizenship is that of
inclusion, it is an exclusionary practice. Social geographers point
out that historically only select groups have been entitled to citi-
zenship (Valentine 2001). That is to say, despite the ideal of citizens
of any given state being equal members and participants in that
community, in reality in many countries populations are divided
along longstanding gender, sexuality, religious, cultural, racial and
ethnic lines. Many groups have only seen a slow extension of the
rights of citizenship over time and through political struggles.
Consider, for example, the experience of the women’s liberation
movement in the global North at the start of the 20th century or
the American civil rights movement after the Second World War.
Geographical thinking has thus argued that the ideal of citizenship
does not exist in reality.
Citizenship therefore exists as an uneven physical, socio-cultural
and political space accessible by different people to varying degrees.
In some cases, there are formalized divisions in concepts of citizenship
with certain communities living within nation-states denied the
140 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

rights of full citizenship. An often cited example is the case of guest

workers that came to work in West Germany (before German
unification in 1990) after the Second World War (one of the largest
groups being Turkish). These workers were intended to return to
their ‘home’ countries but most never did. However, for a long
time they existed as second-class ‘non-citizens’ in Germany, denied
social rights and other benefits. They were also historically restricted
in the extent to which they could move around Germany, as well
as being confined to specific places and types of accommodation. In
this sense, these workers were caught up in all kinds of physical and
social exclusionary spaces in relation to citizenship. Another exam-
ple is the limited rights offered to lesbians and gay men, with social
geographers pointing to their exclusion from full citizenship
(Browne et al. 2009). There are therefore many dimensions to
exclusionary spaces of citizenship. One widely examined aspect is
the way heterosexual men and women can acquire citizenship
though marriage or legal partnership in most countries of the world
whereas very few countries offer the same opportunity to lesbians
or gay men (Valentine 1995; 2001).
However, geographers are also interested in less formalized kinds
of exclusion from citizenship. Social geographers’ work on sexuality
has demonstrated in this respect how the ‘spaces of sexual citizen-
ship’ are exclusionary in multiple ways that involve both physical
and material spaces (buildings, cities, places) and social spaces (social
groups, communities and networks). In many liberal countries of
the global North – in Western Europe and North America – the
argument here is that it is possible to be gay only in certain specific
places and spaces. Being visibly gay in northern Europe may be
easy, acceptable and comfortable in a gay bar or club but the same
is not true for a gay man at a football match or in certain urban
districts at certain times of day. Geographers have argued that
this reveals the uneven spaces of what might be called ‘everyday
citizenship’.
Other work been concerned with understanding how different
groups reshape ideas of their own citizenship around alternative
spaces (in physical, social and virtual ways). For example, geo-
graphers have looked at the importance of gay neighbourhoods in
cities such as London, Amsterdam or San Francisco in developing
senses of citizenship (Binnie and Valentine 1999; Browne 2006).
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 141

This has shifted geographical understandings of citizenship beyond

the narrow idea of rights and responsibilities associated with
national community membership. Rather, geographical thinking
sees citizenship increasingly broadly as a set of practices that occur
in other spaces – the home, the neighbourhood or rural areas
(Parker 2002) – and which are related to multiple senses of
belonging by people to different communities. With the ongoing
development of virtual communities in cyberspace, such concerns
are already shifting further towards consideration of virtual net-
works of citizenship through social media such as Facebook,
MySpace and other online spaces.

DIASPORA

The concept of the diaspora is used increasingly by human

geographers to describe the globally scattered populations of
members of certain ethnic groups. The word ‘diaspora’ itself
simply refers to that kind of spatial distribution: it is the kind of
scattered spatial pattern you would get if you dipped a paintbrush
into a can of paint and flicked it against a wall. Diasporic populations
or groups of people that are generally referred to in this way
are people of Jewish ethnic backgrounds, people of black African
descent and people of ethnic Chinese origin living around the
world. Diasporic communities are therefore the consequence of
past patterns of migration going back many centuries, and in parti-
cular where people have moved to many different places and
regions around the planet. The idea of diasporic communities takes
the concept a stage further, however, from this and is – to a
degree – more debatable. Some commentators, thinkers and politicians
have argued that different diasporic groups correspond to what is
effectively a scattered nation with a common identity, usually based
around an ethnic origin and culture. Such an idea is controversial,
however, since many diasporic communities are made up of different
groups that have also developed significant cultural distinctiveness
over time.
Two examples are particularly useful and have widely concerned
human geographers. The first is the global Jewish diaspora. Focusing
on religion and cultural commonality, it is quite easy to argue that a
coherent Jewish diaspora does exist, with various people of Jewish
142 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

descent around the globe identifying themselves strongly with that

sense of scattered community. The history of the development of
this diaspora goes back many centuries, and corresponds to complex
patterns of migration that occurred for a variety of reasons, including
the historical persecution of Jews in Europe. While there are different
strands to the Jewish religion, people in this diaspora continue to share
much commonality in ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic
terms. The nation-state of Israel was created in 1947 in the Middle
East partly on the basis that the Jewish diasporic community had no
national homeland and needed one in the modern world.
However, other concepts or imaginaries of diasporic communities
are less well defined. This is well illustrated by an example in the form
of the black African diaspora in the countries around the Atlantic
Ocean. Termed the ‘Black Atlantic’, this diasporic community consists
of people of black African descent now living in Europe, the
Americas and Caribbean. The ancestry of these people is largely
connected to the European slave trade between the 16th and early
19th centuries that forcibly relocated black Africans from the
African continent and scattered them on both sides of the Atlantic
Ocean (see box). Such a diasporic community undoubtedly represents
a looser sense of the concept since many of the people involved,
while of black African ancestry, may have much less in common in
linguistic, cultural or religious terms than people considered part of the
Jewish diaspora. The idea of a diasporic community is thus a variable
one, and geographical thinking has been very much concerned to
consider to what extent a given supposed community actually
represents a coherent group of people with a shared identity,
culture and understanding.

THE ‘BLACK ATLANTIC’

In his 1992 book The Black Atlantic, the cultural theorist Paul Gilroy
argues that people in many countries of Europe and North America
are united in a diasporic community based on their common ethnic
ancestry and, equally importantly, on the historical experience of
slavery and racism. The identity of the black diaspora that is scat-
tered across Europe and the New World has emerged, he suggests,
as the result of an ongoing process of travel and exchange across the
Atlantic. The senses of identity that have resulted are a consequence
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 143

of an ongoing process of defining the African black diaspora in rela-

tion to European modernity. The book itself is therefore an argument
for the active generation of a certain kind of diasporic transnational
identity that recognizes how the history of slavery is bound up with
the dominance of Western culture over black African culture.
Such an argument is similar and related to the work of Edward
Said insofar as it engages with historical questions of representation
and imagined identities (see Chapter 4). Gilroy contends that a
shared experience of ‘terror’ lies at the heart of black diasporic
communities all across the Atlantic. He identifies this as the ‘root
cause’ of transnational black identity and suggests that for 150 years
black intellectuals have travelled and worked in a transnational frame
that has more or less excluded anything but a weak or very limited
association with their country of origin. The point is that the senses
of identity shared by the black diaspora are inseparable from a com-
plex history of African diasporic culture, which is itself transnational in
nature and has been for a long time. Such a set of arguments has been
important for human geographers in attempts to better understand
diasporic identities and the way they have developed in time and
space. However, they are not unproblematic. Critics of the ‘Black
Atlantic’ concept argue that this community is in fact fractured and
incoherent and that there is little genuine shared sense of identity or
scope for developing the imaginary of a black diasporic nation.

MOBILITY
For a long time, questions of the movement of people in human
geography focused purely on migration. We will consider this
shortly, but first it is important to emphasize that in the last couple
of decades the subject has become increasingly concerned with
differentiating migration from other forms of mobility that have
become important in the last century or so. People are moving
with increasing frequency and in all kinds of ways and, over the last
50 years or so, this has had enormous implications for economies,
societies and people’s daily lives.
Geographers have become caught up in a wider debate in the
social sciences about the crucial importance of mobility in today’s
144 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

world. In broad terms, this is very easy to establish factually. There

are more than 200 million migrants living in the world today, with
the global tourist industry being worth nearly $1 billion and, for
example, more than 675 million people taking a flight in the
United States during 2008 alone (Adey 2009). The scale of people
movement on Earth today is staggering. Yet such figures also perhaps
conceal the less dramatic or noticeable mobility that is present in
everyday life. Think of all the people commuting daily to work,
children travelling to school or people going to buy food in shops.
However, in theoretical terms human geographers have argued that
mobility is even more ubiquitous. Not only people move but also
objects, images, ideas and knowledge, which we experience constantly.
Geographers have thus also become interested not just in how
people move, but in how the mobility of other things affects people
all the time. What happens in a given fixed place such as a city is
often entirely dependent on other things being in motion. An airport
exists as a meaningful place because of the constant movement of
people, planes and numerous other objects in and out of it. The
same applies to all places, whether offices, factories, homes or
shopping malls. The argument therefore is that mobility is every-
where insofar as it is something we do and experience all the time.
However, there are many different kinds of mobility, with some
forms being more or less extensive or at differing speeds.

MIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION

Migration is a topic rarely out of the headlines in the global media.
If you live in a country in the global North – whether that is North
America, Europe or Australasia – you are likely to have encoun-
tered vigorous political debates in your country about whether
migration is desirable. Usually this is about whether or not people
from other parts of the world should be welcomed or prevented
from coming to live in your country, and most debate is concerned
with whether migration creates a benefit or a burden on the host
country.
However, the concept of migration has a much broader usage in
human geography. In simple terms, migration refers to the move-
ment of people, and there are many different kinds of reasons that
lead people to move from one part of the world to another.
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 145

Geographers and other social scientists often talk about ‘push’ fac-
tors that cause people to move, such as political instability, war or
enforced migration. Equally, there are argued to be ‘pull’ factors as
well, which include employment opportunities or the attractiveness
of the environment in a given area. However, migration is another
of those concepts that seems relatively straightforward but in fact
proves more difficult to define upon closer consideration. For a
start, it is often used interchangeably with the term ‘immigration’,
although they are not strictly speaking identical – immigration
refers more specifically to people moving across national borders in
the global system of nation-states (see the discussion of the state in
Chapter 4). Moreover, even in simple terms, not all forms of
human movement equate to either term. Tourism is an obvious
example we will consider later in this chapter, but another men-
tioned already would be the daily commuting by workers in large
global cities such as London, New York or Tokyo, which does not
fulfil general understandings of ‘migration’. Yet if those workers
spend part of their time living in those cities during the week
before returning to another home at the weekend, then we might
regard that as a form of temporary migration. The key issue is that
migration is actually a specific form of mobility that needs to be
distinguished from others, and the distinction between what repre-
sents ‘migration’ as opposed to other forms of mobility is blurred.
How far a person moves and how long they stay in a place tends to
define whether they are regarded as a migrant as opposed to a
commuter, traveller or tourist.
Human geographers therefore tend to categorize movement that
does correspond to migration by using criteria centred on time and
space. Regarding the temporality of migration – that is, how patterns
of migration vary over time – much work has sought to analyse what
might be understood to be ‘permanent migration’. For example, in
the modern period of recent centuries, many hundreds of thousands
of Europeans moved to a new part of the world to live and largely
remained there. Consider the many people from the British Isles who
moved permanently to North America, Australia and parts of Africa
during the period of the British Empire. Many of the people who
perished when the ocean liner Titanic sank in 1912 were similar
migrants on their way to New York. Given the transport technologies
and costs of long-distance travel until the mid-20th century, people
146 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

mainly moved to the ‘new world’ to settle and live the rest of their
lives there. Few returned to their home countries. Geographers
have historically done much analysis of past permanent migration
patterns going back centuries. However, in today’s world, what
corresponds to a permanent form of migration is much less clear.
People are much more able to return to their country of birth with
modern forms of international travel, and it has become rare for
individuals to migrate from their home country to another and then
stay there for the remainder of their lives. Unlike a mid-19th cen-
tury emigrant from Europe, you can return to your home country
on a plane quite easily and comparatively cheaply from anywhere
on the planet within a period of a day or so. That does not mean
that permanent migration no longer occurs, far from it, but it is
much harder to define, map and measure.
A second way of categorizing migration concerns the reason or
motivation behind it. Why do people migrate? Human geographers
distinguish between voluntary and forced migration, and economic
as opposed to political reasons for moving. People who leave their
home country in order to find a job or seek a better quality of life
elsewhere do so voluntarily as economic migrants, whereas those
who flee a civil war or a famine move because they are being
forced to and are refugees.
Finally, a third important distinction is between legal and illegal
migration. In today’s global system of nation-states, whether an
individual is permitted to move to another part of the world and
stay there is bound up with a range of laws and policies that vary
between different nation-states and regional super-states such as the
European Union. For political migrants, international law gives
people the right to seek asylum (see below). However, the legality
of an economic migrant depends largely on the policies and laws
within certain states. Some countries actively seek and welcome inward
migration to fill gaps in their labour markets, while others seek to
prevent it. If you as a European go to work in the United States,
for example, you will need to get the required permit that entitles
you to work there legally. However, many economic migrants in
today’s world move without the legal sanction of the state they
move to. Current examples include the continued flow of north
Africans sailing small boats across the Mediterranean to enter
the European Union, or Mexicans crossing the southern border of
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 147

the United States. Migration in today’s world is thus often a highly

politicized issue, frequently making news headlines.
Beyond examining these kinds of categorizations, human geo-
graphers are keen to understand how the nature of migration itself
in our 21st-century world is changing. At least four important
trends have been identified which are the focus of much current
work on the topic (Castles and Miller 2003). The first is that, not
surprisingly, migration as a phenomenon is becoming more globalized.
More countries and regions of the world are affected by it, and
there is growing diversity in terms of the places where people
migrate from and to. Second, the process of migration is accelerating
with the volume of movements increasing worldwide at the
moment. A third trend is that migration is becoming differentiated
insofar as in the world today there are many more types of movement
between countries. That is, if arguably permanent migration was
the dominant form at some points in the past, it is now combined
with the economic migration of skilled labour, refugees, students,
retirees and others. Finally, and perhaps less obviously, migration is
becoming feminized. In short, more and more of the people
moving are women. Some of these are women joining male
partners who have migrated, but there is a growing number of
women who are migrants in their own right. An example of this
would be the thousands of Indonesian women who have left to
work as economic migrants such as care workers, cleaners or
household maids in wealthier places such as Singapore or the
United States.

REFUGEES AND ASYLUM

The concept of a refugee in the contemporary world is defined in

international law in the Geneva Convention of 1951. The
convention defines a refugee as an individual who has migrated
because of a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of
race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group
or political opinion’, and is now outside his or her country of
nationality. A further element emphasizes that a refugee is afraid
to return to their country of origin because of that fear. The con-
cept has thus changed over time, and really has only had its current
meaning in international law since the late 20th century. The
148 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

Office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees

(UNHCR) estimated that there were at least 15.2 million refugees
worldwide in 2009 (UNHCR 2010). The most common reason is
war and conflict, but other reasons include famine and persecution
(see box below).
Closely linked to this idea is that of ‘asylum’. Although it has its
origins in the idea of religious asylum in medieval Europe, in the
modern world someone who ‘seeks asylum’ does so to seek protection
from a country other than the one of their nationality. This concept
of asylum exists as a right under the 1951 UN convention relating
to the status of refugees. It was further developed in a 1967 UN
Protocol. It is important to realize, therefore, that prior to this point
there was no such legal status internationally for asylum-seekers and
few migrants claimed such a status. Seeking asylum is thus an aspect
of migration that has only become possible recently as a global-scale
system of nation-states has developed that is governed by a range of
supranational organizations like the UN (see the discussion of
governance in Chapter 4).
In recent decades, the issue of asylum has become an increasingly
politicized one because of the particular international geography of
asylum applications. In 2008, there were around 350,000 asylum
requests in the 34 wealthier countries that form the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (that
is, loosely, in the global North), and this represents an ongoing
trend of increase. However, of these just five countries received
nearly half of all applications: the UK, the US, France, Canada and
Italy each having more than 30,000 applications. In 2009, the UN
estimated that the global total for asylum applications was just short
of 1 million people. Thus, globally there has been a dramatic
increase in the number of international asylum seekers since the late
1980s but there is a very distinct geography to where applications
are being made. Reflecting this, over the last couple of decades, the
European Union has sought to develop a common policy approach
to deal with this significant increase in asylum applications.
While some politicians in high-application-level countries such as
the UK and France have argued that many of these asylum appli-
cations are unjustified, in reality the drivers behind the increase in
asylum applications are more complex. At least three factors are
important. First, increased asylum applications worldwide are
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 149

undoubtedly also related to wider processes of globalization that

have led to more and more people across the globe being aware of
the possibility of claiming asylum, the international laws and insti-
tutions that support it and the scope for increased global mobility
(the growing capacity and falling cost of air travel) that makes it
easier for them to move (see the section on mobility). A second
factor is the continual occurrence of wars and conflicts around the
globe, as well as oppressive nation-state governments causing
people to flee. In the last few decades, there has been no shortage
of conflict producing significant exoduses of people who have
sought refuge from persecution. Examples include the various wars
in the former state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and more recently
the repressive regimes in the Middle East and Asia (to a lesser
extent). Relatively large numbers in Europe and North America
have come from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, prior to the 2002 war.
Third, a wider knowledge of the international legal status of asylum
led some people who wished to be economic migrants to claim such
status. In the UK, France and Germany such migrants were dubbed
‘bogus’ asylum seekers from certain political perspectives, but in reality,
determining whether an individual is a true asylum seeker is a complex
and often subjective process. It is inevitably a matter of judgement and
speculation for any country to assess the likelihood that people claim-
ing to flee political persecution from oppressive states will actually be
persecuted if they are returned to their country of origin.

THE REFUGEE CRISIS IN DARFUR, SOUTHERN

SUDAN
Since 2003, a civil war in the southern region of Sudan in east Africa
has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee as refugees; the
UN estimates that more than 300,000 people have been killed. The
war started when a rebel army, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and
another group, the Justice and Equality Movement, started attacking
government targets and accusing the Sudanese government of
oppressing black Africans and favouring people of Arab descent. The
conflict focuses on the region of Darfur – an area that has had a long
history of political tension around land and grazing rights.
Not surprisingly many people have sought to flee the conflict. This
has happened at several scales. By the far the greatest movement of
150 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

people was the exodus from the towns in the region. By early 2010, it
was estimated that around 2.7 million people had fled urban areas
and were living in temporary camps nearby. These people are not
conventional international refugees, not having moved across a
border, but their situation is comparable. However, at the interna-
tional scale, it also estimated that at least 200,000 conventional
refugees had crossed the border into the (poor) neighbouring
African country of Chad. These people moved to refugee camps
along a roughly 500km stretch of the border and suffered attacks
from rebel forces from the Sudanese side of the border.
Darfur’s refugee crisis illustrates the complex nature of the nature
of what is meant by a ‘refugee’ in today’s world as well as the diffi-
culties in tackling the humanitarian crises that refugee movements of
this scale often produce (especially in the global South). With an
ongoing civil war, providing these people with their basic needs
of foods, water, shelter and safety is challenging – let alone any
longer-term solution to re-establishing them in a permanent home.

TRANSNATIONALISM

Another concept that links debates in the last section around

mobility, citizenship and diasporas is the concept of transnational-
ism. Literally, the word ‘transnational’ means across nations and the
idea of the transnational firm should be familiar from Chapter 2.
Human geographers have, however, used the word in several ways
to try to capture the complex connections in social life that exist in
an increasingly globalized world. What is important about the idea
of transnationalism is that it bridges static ideas of migration (people
moving to another place) with the dynamic maintenance of con-
nections between places at the global scale. These connections can
relate to all aspects of life – social, cultural, political and economic –
and represent a new phenomenon in a globalized world because
previously these aspects of life largely existed below the national
scale (for example, senses of identity). Transnationalism thus has
many potential applications from a geographical perspective in
theorizing global-scale interconnections. However, at least three
areas of work in particular have made use of the concept in recent
years.
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 151

The first relates to our earlier discussion of diasporas. Political geo-

graphers have used the concept of transnationalism to understand
political movements, identities and organizations that exist beyond the
scale of the nation-state. Some of the diasporas discussed earlier are
examples in this respect. The development and maintenance of a
common sense of identity in a diasporic community relates to
transnationalism as a process. Whether or not people of the same
ethnic group scattered across the planet see themselves as belonging
to a certain community is about the ongoing linkages and flows of
ideas and values that lead them to imagine themselves in that way.
For global diasporas, transnationalism corresponds to travel, the
exchange of cultural ideas, the movement of objects and the sharing
of cultural practices and customs. The concept is used in an attempt
to appreciate how the ‘global-ness’ of political identities or move-
ments is something that requires transnational practices to create them.
This links to a second way in which cultural geographers have made
extensive use of the concept to describe the complex flows of cultural
‘things’ in today’s world. The transnational geographies of cultural
objects has been a particular focus of attention (Crang et al. 2003). As
we discussed when considering geographies of consumption, many
products and material objects are marked by the characteristics of
particular places but travel great distances to be consumed in other
places. Finally, transnationalism has also been used in relation to the
emergence of a new ‘transnational elite’ social group or class in
global society. Geographers have become interested in this new highly
mobile segment of global society who may have multiple passports
from different nation-states and who straddle both local laws and reg-
ulations, but also live across multiple cultural norms associated with
different places. Essentially these are people who live across national
boundaries in today’s world, and are now, it is argued, important in the
processes of cultural and political globalization.

TRAVEL AND TOURISM

One of the most important aspects of the rise in travel in the last
century or so is the development of tourism. Tourism is now the
world’s largest industry, employing more than 240 million people
(Adey 2009), and has an enormous impact on economies and societies
around the globe as well as huge implications for the environment and
152 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

the physical fabric of places. Human geographers have always been at

the forefront of the study of tourism, probably because of the way in
which debates about tourism combine economic, environmental,
social and development issues. There is a large body of work on tourism
within human geography, and it is impossible to summarize all of the
many aspects to this here. For our purposes, however, we can consider
three main aspects of geographical work.
First, a major area of work has considered the development of
travel and tourist infrastructure, the planning process and the impact
of such development on economies and places. From the 1970s
onwards, human geographers mapped and measured the rise of
tourism as an industry in terms of its economic impacts. This
included examining where it was creating jobs, the nature of the
companies that developed and the kinds of tourist developments
that appeared in certain places. Economic geographical work has
also looked at the role of tourism in economic development in
lower-income regions, and considered the role of governments and
other agencies in facilitating or hindering tourist development.
However, a more substantial body of work in geography has appraised
the wider impact of the rapid growth of tourism in the last 50 years,
and developed a range of critical lines of analysis in relation to tourism.
Examples include how environmental geographers have pointed to
the negative impact of poorly regulated tourist development that
has damaged natural habitats (for example, marine coral ecosystems)
(Desforges 2005; Mowforth and Munt 2008). More recent work
has considered how viable different ecotourism projects might be
to develop more sustainable forms of tourism, as well as the rise of
new forms of ‘ethical tourism’ (see box on voluntourism).
Second, work from a cultural geographical perspective has
engaged with the social and cultural values that underpin much of
the tourist industry (Williams 2009). Geographers have assessed the
commonly held view that excessive tourist development ‘destroys
places’ and ‘spoils local cultures’. Increasingly, cultural geographical
work has been important in questioning and problematizing these
ideas. Human geographers point to the complex relationship
between places and people’s culture, and the difficulty in isolating
‘pre-tourist’ or ‘authentic’ local cultures. The debate about tourism
has thus been important in developing theoretical understandings of
how place ‘authenticity’ is constructed and how classic concepts of
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 153

authenticity in the global South are in fact caught up in colonial

discourses – authentic often means ‘primitive’, ‘working-class’, ‘pea-
sant’. In this sense, geographers have argued that the ‘authentic places’
tourists are offered and seek are presented as isolated from the ‘outside
influences’ of other places when they are not isolated at all. In
the globalized world we live in today, this represents a false idea of the
world since communities everywhere on the planet are increasingly
linked to each other by all kinds of flows and connections.
Finally, more recent work within human geography has moved
beyond simple critiques of tourist development to develop a more
sophisticated understanding of what happens to places when they
become connected to the global tourism industry (Church and
Coles 2006). Tourism in this sense produces places. Recent work
has argued that it does this because of the distinctive relationship it
sets up between producers (those who provide tourist infrastructure
and services) and the consumers (tourists). Tourists often meet the
producers of tourist experiences face to face – that is, they are in the
same physical place. What is more, the experience of tourism cannot
be taken home but involves the consumption of places by actually
being there. If you visit the Empire State Building in New York or
Machu Picchu (the lost Inca city) in Peru, what you consume is the
experience of being there. You look at or ‘gaze’ on the place, but
may also experience it in other ways – food, physical activity and so
on. Geographers have thus become interested in the range of actors
that influence the nature of these tourist places, whether they are
travel companies shaping the nature of hotels and facilities or tour
guides leading tourists around a certain set of imagined spaces. Such
work also extends to a consideration of how the development of
tourist places as destinations shapes patterns of global travel and the
way in which tourist spaces are regulated.

‘VOLUNTOURISM’, GAP YEARS AND THE GLOBAL

SOUTH
Many young people (and some older people), mostly from countries
in the global North, have become involved in a new phenomenon in
today’s world: the emergence of volunteer tourism – sometimes
termed ‘voluntourism’ – in places of the global South. If you live in
the UK or Australia, this might correspond to some kind of ‘gap
154 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

year’, ‘career break’ (for people of working age) or a post-retirement

expedition. In the US, it is more likely that younger people will
experience voluntourism through organizations such as the Peace
Corps. Its common feature is individuals spending time on a volun-
teering project – that is social, educational or environmental in
nature – in a country in the global South.
Work within human geography has been well positioned to try to
understand the complex factors behind the rise of ‘voluntourism’, ‘gap
years’, international voluntary service and other related phenomena in
our globalized world. Media critics in Western countries have, over the
last decade or so, sometimes dismissed many types of voluntourism as
just another form of (often backpacker) tourism with little benefit
beyond that of other forms of tourism. However, geographical thinking
has argued that this kind of phenomenon is much more complicated.
It is neither a pure form of tourism nor work (see section on work
below), and is linked to the internationalization of the labour market,
the need for people increasingly to gain experience of different
regions and the transformations in the nature of what tourism itself
means. For example, the rise of environmental awareness and dis-
courses of environmental action and conservation are clearly linked to
the rise of ecotourism and associated forms of voluntourism. It is also
impossible to appreciate effectively the factors behind the development
of this form of mobility without an understanding of the blend of
economic, cultural, social and technological factors driving it.

LABOUR GEOGRAPHIES
Human geography’s interest in labour extends beyond purely eco-
nomic concerns about the nature of labour and its role in producing
goods and services in places. During the 1970s and 1980s, a sig-
nificant body of work within a political economy tradition in
human geography also examined labour inequalities and the politics
of labour. Human geographers were at this point interested in the
factors producing labour exploitation in different industries and
places, as well as the way in which labour organizations such as
trade unions affected working conditions, workers’ rights and
industrial relations. Since the 1980s, this strand of work has continued
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 155

but has become increasingly concerned with labour inequality at the

global rather than the national and regional levels. Geographers today
are concerned, for example, with the nature of working conditions that
workers in textiles or electronics factories in Asia experience and how
that relates to union organization or the role of non-governmental
organizations and global consumers pressurizing firms to improve them.

WORK

Beneath the scale of the national or regional labour market, or the

labour force in a certain industry, human geography has also been
very concerned with individual labour – what is more generally
known as ‘work’. Understanding what work ‘is’ as a form of activ-
ity people undertake seems at face value to be straightforward. The
commonest everyday conception of work is something people do
for money (i.e. they are paid). However, human geographical
thinking about work joins other social science disciplines in con-
ceptualizing this activity in a rather more complex and diverse
manner. Work can be paid or unpaid, the latter category including,
for example, voluntary work or domestic work (cleaning your
house or doing the laundry). Furthermore, there is then the question
of the spaces in which work occurs. Conventionally, we think of
people working in factories or offices but in fact work occurs in all
kinds of different environments. Domestic work obviously occurs
in the home, but people obviously also work in all kinds of differ-
ent places: in fields, in the street, online, while they are travelling
on trains, ships and planes (whether as passengers or crew). In the
‘new economy’, where services have been ever more dominant in
terms of employment, a growing proportion of people also under-
take paid work in service industry environments of one form or
another: in shops, malls, restaurants, bars, hotels, gyms, cinemas and
other leisure facilities. Work is therefore a very broad concept, but
human geographers see it as very geographical in nature because
work remains deeply place-based. People when they are working,
in short, have to be somewhere and in that sense work always occurs
in a specific physical location (it also even occurs in virtual spaces).
It may be a factory, an office, in a field or in the street, but when
someone undertakes work, they are clearly situated in one place or
another (Castree et al. 2004).
156 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

THE GLOBALIZATION OF WORK AND THE EMERGENCE OF A GLOBAL

BUSINESS CLASS

Recent geographical thinking has begun to consider the con-

sequences of ongoing globalization processes for work along with
the way in which this is producing new kinds of worker identities.
There are at least three important aspects to geographical thinking
worth highlighting here.
First, geographers have begun to be interested in the globaliza-
tion of working practices. The growth and increasing dominance of
transnational firms in all industries in the global economy has led to
a shift in the way in which people work. For many professional and
managerial workers, there has been a significant increase in the need
for business travel in order to conduct the business of transnational
firms operating in many regions. For example, if you design com-
puter games for Sony in the UK to be sold globally, it is likely you
will need to visit colleagues in the process of designing a new game.
Equally, if you are corporate lawyer in Hong Kong working on
contracts to do with new factories for a Korean firm, you will
almost certainly end up in meetings in Seoul. The point is that as
the economic activity and firms transnationalize, working prac-
tices for a significant proportion of the world’s workers are also
globalizing.
Second, geographers have become interested the way in which
work as an activity is influenced by factors across many scales.
People may always and everywhere undertake work in a specific
place, but what they are doing as work is increasingly linked to very
distant relationships. Work as a kind of practice is increasingly
becoming globalized in places just as workers are becoming globally
mobile. There are many aspects to this but improving information
and communications technologies (ICT) are key factors in facilitat-
ing this change. Many transnational firms make extensive use of
tele- and video-conferencing, Skype and other ever-improving
forms of virtual communication enabling work to be conducted by
workers together while they are physically scattered across the
globe. However, it is not just those working for large global firms
that are undertaking forms of globalized work. The work under-
taken by agricultural workers in Kenyan flower- or vegetable-
growing industries, for example, is closely regulated and shaped by
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 157

the needs and demands on a daily basis of supermarkets in Europe

and North America.
Finally, arguments related to the globalization of work have also
been applied to the question of what is happening to worker
identities and groupings in the global economy. Traditionally,
human geographers, like other social scientists, made use of the idea
of class within regions or national economies to differentiate groups
of workers by their common kinds of work and the relationship of
this to the overall production process. The working class undertook
manual and other forms of labour while white-collar ‘middle-class’
workers occupied professional and managerial positions. While the
concept of class has been widely criticized and it is argued in many
countries that these kinds of class distinctions are no longer very clear
cut, at the global scale, the concept of new forms of emerging class
groups has been proposed. In the section on transnationalism, we
mentioned how geographers have become interested in the emergence
of a transnational business elite in recent decades. Some geographers
and other social scientists think that, in relation to economic pro-
cesses, a segment of this elite really corresponds to a new kind of
global class (see box). This class is composed of people who occupy
managerial and professional positions in that economy, generally
working for the growing number of transnational corporations in
that economy. Often these are the highly mobile business travellers
who undertake the globalized working practices already discussed.
These people come from and work in many different countries, and in
that respect quite often have more in common with each other than in
that economy with many of the people from their home country.
Whether or not elite workers in the global economy do in fact
correspond to a new kind of global class remains the subject of
much debate, but human geographers concerned with labour and
work are continuing to study the emergence and development of
this new layer in global society.

THE NEW GLOBAL BUSINESS NOMADS?

In the media, global business executives are represented by positive
images of sophisticated travellers who enjoy the excitement, luxury
and cosmopolitanism of travel often seen in James Bond films.
However, the reality of transnational business work for business
158 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

people in the global economy has become less romanticized. George

Clooney in the 2009 film Up in the Air depicts a more contemporary
representation of the experience of what some human geographers
call the ‘new global business class’. These are the executives who
work for the growing number of transnational corporations in the
global economy, and who have to spend an increasing proportion of
their time engaged in ‘nomadic’ business travel in order to run these
companies. Clooney’s character falls in love with a fellow traveller
but their relationship nearly fails because of the demands of such a
mobile lifestyle. Human geographers have pointed to the limitations
of global mobility and the negative impacts on workers in terms of
family life, relationships and happiness. Clearly there are limits to
the degree to which workers can be physically mobile, and the reality
of increased business travel for many workers is a detrimental
impact on their quality of life far removed from the glamorous
images.

SUMMARY
In this chapter we have considered:

 The way population geographers have studied global population

unevenness, change and crisis, as well as theories of how popu-
lation growth relates to economic development;
 The concept of citizenship and how it varies geographically, as well
as the relationship between citizenship and different types of spaces;
 The nature of diasporic communities;
 Geographical approaches to mobility, travel and tourism;
 The way in which geographers have theorized different types
and patterns of migration;
 What is meant by labour geographies and how human geo-
graphers have studied difference in labour markets and labour
relations between different regions of the world;
 The nature of work and how work has become globalized as an
activity;
 Debates about the emergence of a global business class in recent
decades.
 PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY 159

FURTHER READING
Adey, P. (2008) Mobility. London: Routledge.
One of the Key Ideas in Geography series, this books provides an overview of
the breadth of current human geographical debates about mobility.

Castree, N., Coe, N., Ward, K. and Samers, M. (2004) Spaces of Work.
London: Sage.
This book has a good discussion of labour geographies and how labour in the
global economy is caught up in place. Chapters 4, 5 and 7 are especially useful
in this respect.

Cohen, R. (2008) Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London; Routledge.

The author is not a human geographer, but on the question of diasporas this
book is probably one of the best overviews of the issues that concern geo-
graphical work.

Pacione, M. (ed.) (2012) Population Geography: Progress and Prospect. London:

Routledge.
This is a classic geographical population book from the mid-1980s that has
been republished. It has a good range of chapters discussing different ways in
which human geographers have engaged with questions of population.

Williams, S. (2009) Tourism Geography: A New Synthesis [2nd edition]. London:

Routledge.
This book in its new edition provides a good overview of the range of issues
addressed in relation to tourism by human geographers.

WEB RESOURCES
Have a look at the UN Population division’s website: www.un.org/esa/
population/
On transnationalism, the University of Toronto has an interesting research
centre www.utoronto.ca/cdts/graduate.html
 7

BODIES, PRACTICES AND

IDENTITIES

This chapter examines how human geographers have engaged

in debates about the nature of human bodies, social practices and
the development of senses of identity surrounding gender, race,
sexuality and age. All three areas of geographical work on these
topics span debates in many of the major sub-disciplines within
the subject including social, cultural, economic and political
geographies.

THE BODY
It may seem a little strange that human geographers are inter-
ested in human bodies, but in fact a substantial amount of geo-
graphical work has focused on the nature of bodies within social,
cultural and feminist geographies. What is a body? Each of us
has one but there is actually much debate among human geo-
graphers and other social scientists as to where we might think
about the body ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ and about what it means
to have a body.
Taking the first issue, geographers’ arguments are based on the
relationship between the mind and the body, and whether or not the
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 161

body is a ‘natural’ or ‘social’ thing (Valentine 2001). Geographical

thinking has engaged with the widespread conception of the
relationship between the body and mind first developed by the
17th-century philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes is
famous for the widely (and often incorrectly) quoted phrase: ‘I
think, therefore I am.’ The notion (often termed as ‘Cartesian’)
expresses the idea that your body is essentially like a machine, with
your mind as the controlling power that is responsible for your
intelligence, your identity and your spirituality. This is what is
known as a dualistic division and has had many implications for
how we understand the world centuries later.
Feminist geographers argue that this dualism is important because
it has shaped understandings of society and the nature of space itself,
as well as the way geographical knowledge has been produced
(Rose 1993). For example, the classic definition Descartes offers of
the mind as being separate from the body is argued to have led to a
definition of rational knowledge as masculinist. This means that any
knower of knowledge can separate themself from their body.
‘Emotions, values, and past experiences’ are conversely feminine,
and have no place in rational or scientific knowledge (Rose 1993: 7).
In this way, knowledge is not tainted by bodily experience and
thought is context-free and autonomous.
Another related way in which human geographers have theo-
rized what it means to have a body concerns the degree to which
bodies are ‘natural’ or ‘social’. Echoing the debates we discussed
earlier concerning the degree to which it is possible to separate the
category of ‘nature’ from ‘society’, human geographers have argued
that many of our understandings of bodies as ‘natural’ are in fact
socially constructed.

BODY AS SPACES

In geographical thinking about the body, the key issue is that

the body does not just exist ‘in space’, but is actually a space in
itself. Human geographers have conceptualized the body as a space
in three ways. First, they argue that it is a kind of surface that
is marked, inscribed and transformed by culture. We inscribe our
identities on our bodies, and it is also a surface that is written on,
162 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

marked, scarred and transformed by wider society and its institutions.

Geographers share with other social scientists an understanding of
how the development of modernity affected the way in which people
think about their bodies and behave. In Shakespearian times, for
example, social attitudes to spitting, defecating and personal hygiene
were very different – especially in public places. People were not
offended by human excrement in the street. It was not just because
there were no public toilets; society saw no need for them. The
point is that attitudes towards bodies and their behaviours are not
pre-given but have evolved over time and our bodies reflect and
are governed by societies’ expectations, norms and rules. Equally,
the body is a surface space as it reflects social position. People in a
certain social class wear certain clothes, behave in certain ways and
eat certain foods.
A second way in which geographers have understood the body as
a space is as the space through which we sense and experience the
world. A body is a space that senses (i.e. it is ‘sensuous’ in the literal
meaning of the word). The body is therefore a personal space
through which people come to construct widely held definitions of
ideas such as well-being, illness, happiness and health. Bodies are
also the means by which we can experience and connect with other
spaces. This has led human geographers to argue that there is a need
to appreciate the nature of knowledge from all our senses, not just
the visual (Thrift 1996). The experience of a disease such as myalgic
encephalomyelitis (known as ME) may mean that a person who
looks young, healthy and athletic and mobile is in fact afflicted by
fatigue, immobility and discomfort (cf. Moss 1999, cited in
Valentine 2001).
Finally, a third geographical understanding of the body has
focused on the way in which our bodies are the main location
where our personal identities are constructed. Who you are and
how you see yourself as a person is very closely bound up with the
nature of your body – whether you are a man or a woman, the
colour of your skin, your height, size and appearance. Human
geographers have also drawn on psychoanalytical theory to think
about how we understand the difference between ourselves (our
‘interior selves’) and the external world, arguing that interior ideas
of self lead to projections in wider society and across space of ‘us’
(self) and ‘them’ (other).
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 163

BODIES AS SPATIALIZED PROJECTS

One particular way in which human geographers have understood

bodies as surfaces warrants further attention. This is the way geo-
graphers have theorized bodies as surfaces that act as symbols of the
self (and also see the section on self and other below). In Western
societies bodies have become a spatialized ‘project’ to be worked
on. Cultural geographers relate this emergence of the body as a
project to a range of factors including increasing mass consumption,
the democratization of culture, a decline in religious morality and a
post-industrial emphasis in Western societies on hedonism and
pleasure (Turner 1992, cited in Valentine 2001). People thus con-
struct identities through their appearance, and the media, advertis-
ing, fashion, medicine and consumer cultures all shape discourses
within which we evaluate and understand our bodies.
Consider the ways in which plastic surgery and sports science have
given us the possibility to control and reconstruct how our bodies
appear. Not everyone wants to do this – or can afford to do so – but
the body has become an adaptable thing in terms of its size, shape,
appearance and so on. The body has become linked in Western
cultures to a project of identity construction. Women aspire to
being a size eight, to having a well-proportioned figure or skin that
looks a certain way. Society shapes this set of expectations in terms
of health campaigns that encourage people to, for example, lose
weight, take exercise or avoid an excessive amount of sunlight
(if you live in a country such as Australia or the US). People also seek
to counter the effects of ageing, with being old implicitly constructed
as an undesirable form of identity. Likewise, overweight people are
framed in discourses that often stereotype them as indulgent or lazy.
Identity construction is also reflected in more explicit bodily practices
such as body-building or tattoos and piercings.
Human geographers argue, however, that the process of working on
the body as a project is always partial and incomplete. Bodies are not
completely controllable and people experience conflicting ideas of
how their bodies should be produced as a space in different places
and at different times. People experience contradictory impulses all
the time – for example, feeling pressure from society to diet in
order to appear slim in public while still enjoying high-calorie foods
in the private spaces of their homes or when dining with others.
164 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

BODIES IN SPACE

There are two elements to the way in which geographers theorize

how bodies exist in space. The first is the way bodies ‘take up’
space insofar as they ‘occupy’ it through size and appearance,
as well as by how they move and are moved in space (termed
‘comportment’). With respect to the former, social geographers
have been interested in, for example, how the design of many
environments – airplanes cars, buses, restaurants – fail to accom-
odate fat people and make them uncomfortable as well as marking
them out in public as ‘oversized’. In terms of the latter, feminist
geographers in particular have pointed to the way women occupy
and use space differently from men. They often demonstrate
restricted bodily movements such as sitting with their legs crossed
and their arms across themselves (Valentine 2001), whereas men are
more likely to sit with their legs open and using their hands to
gesture. This is not because women are weaker than men, but
because they approach tasks differently. Women think they are
weaker and act accordingly, experiencing their bodies as more fra-
gile than they are (Young 1990). They may also be fearful that their
body space may be invaded by men, and therefore experience their
bodies as ‘enclosed’ or separate from public space. Comportment in
this sense refers to the physicality of bodies, understood through a
range of social meanings and discourses.
The second aspect of the concern of human geographers for
bodies in space centres around how our material bodies are the basis
of our experience of everyday spaces. Everyone else reacts to our
bodies and we react to them and read stories off about a person
(such as age, lifestyle, politics, identity, etc.). A key area of work in
geography has thus focused on how the nature of our bodies makes
a difference to how we experience places and how different bodies
exist in space in a way that marginalizes or excludes them. If you are a
young person you may experience somewhere very differently from
an older person. If you are a man, certain places will seem very
different than they would if you were a woman. Think about the
experience you would have as a young man walking around a large
city at night as opposed to a young woman or as a person in a
wheelchair trying to navigate a subway system in a city such as
New York or Tokyo.
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 165

GENDERED BODIES IN THE PROFESSIONAL

WORKPLACE
In his 1989 semi-autobiographical novel Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis
describes the heavily gendered culture of work as a bond trader in
Wall Street during the boom times of the 1980s. The most successful
traders were described as ‘big swinging dicks’, in an overt equiva-
lence to male sexual prowess. Lewis describes a male-dominated
world where not just the language but also the behaviours and work
cultural norms are strongly masculine. Similarly, Tom Wolfe’s novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) portrayed these traders as arrogant
masculine ‘masters of the universe’ ruling the world economy.
In light of the cultural turn, geographical work investigated the
nature of these heavily gendered financial service and banking work-
places. In her 1994 book Capital Culture, Linda McDowell argued that
gender relations within banking and other financial firms were caught
up in a complex set of discourses, embodied practices and power
relations. The 1990s had seen a growing proportion of women
employed in banking and other leading financial service sectors, but
they were concentrated in the lower-grade jobs in these organizations.
Very few women ever became directors or senior managers.
Based on research in the City of London, McDowell showed how
the embodied gender performances (see section on performance
and performativity below) of men and women related in complex
ways to the way work was undertaken in these banks. An important
finding was that women did not rise to senior positions not because
they were explicitly discriminated against, but because they were less
convincing in the necessary ‘gendered performances’ expected of senior
managers in banks and other firms. McDowell thus showed how
these firms exhibited gendered cultures of work that cannot be easily
changed by simply altering policies within firms or legal regulation.

PRACTICES
A broad definition of practices as used by human geographers and
other social scientists corresponds to ‘the actions of individual or
groups’. This conceptualization of action includes not just physical
behaviour but mental activities such as theorizing or learning. Yet
166 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

like many such generalized concepts, practice has a more specific

and distinct meaning within a number of schools of social scientific
thinking. In the wake of the cultural turn, human geographers have
consulted a range of work in sociology, anthropology, psychology
and management studies in order to think about the significance of
the spatiality of practices and of their consequences in a number of
ways. At least three different strands of thinking about practice have
been particularly influential (Jones and Murphy 2010).
The first concerns how practices help structure, organize and
govern cultures, societies and nations. Second, human geographers
across a range of sub-disciplinary areas have been interested in what
we might call ‘communication’ and ‘discursive’ practices. These
include the role of all forms of social performance, social commu-
nication and language in shaping societies, economies and cultures.
Of particular relevance to this is the social science literature con-
cerned with what is known as actor-network theory (ANT)
(Law 1993; Latour 2005), which is being increasingly used by
human geographers. ANT argues that all forms of communication
practice offer insights into the ways and means of what is termed
translation – the process through which actors exert power, mobilize
material objects, and ‘perform’ in order to achieve particular
objectives.
Finally, human geography has made use of sociological work that
addresses how practices embody tacit forms of knowledge and how
they contribute to organizational cohesion and collective learning.
For example, the managerial and knowledge creation practices
relied on in particular industries and transnational firms (Amin and
Cohendet 2004; Glückler 2005), the governing practices of elites
and states seeking to control and direct economies (Larner 2005),
and the alternative or ‘ordinary’ practices that are involved in ‘non-
capitalist’ economic forms such as cooperatives, informal livelihood
strategies, or unpaid labour (Lee 2006; Gibson-Graham 2008).

PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY

These concepts have a slightly different use in human geography,

with three meanings that are used in the subject. The first is
the everyday one involving such activities as music, dance and
acting. Human geographers have begun to research these topics
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 167

in relation to the way in which subjectivity and identities are con-

structed and linked to spatial experience as well as the visual world.
Second, there is a substantial literature that has utilized sociological
understandings of social action as being like ‘scripted performances’,
framed by a range of discourse-based understandings of the social
world. This draws on the philosopher Judith Butler’s (1990; 1993)
rejection of the idea that biology is the foundation for the cate-
gories of either sex or gender. As mentioned above, gender is not
what you are, it is what you do (Pratt 2005) and is therefore part of
the process of an individual subjectivity. Understood as this kind of
scripted performance, gender corresponds to ‘a repeated stylization
of the body’ and is a ‘set of repeated acts with a highly rigid reg-
ulatory framework’ (Pratt 2005). The idea is that the regulatory
framework of gender categories has ‘congealed’ over (very) long
periods of time in human history, which have led to them appearing
to both have substance and be natural ways for people to exist.
Human geographers have used this idea of gender as performance to
understand the nature of workplace practices as well as geographical
context in the formation of sexual identities.
A third way in which performativity is used within the subject
relates to work within sociology, anthropology and socioeconomics
which has become increasingly concerned to understand how
economies are ‘performed’ (Callon 1998; Mackenzie 2008). This
work beyond geography argues, for example, that what happens in
global financial markets cannot be explained successfully through the
market theories of neoclassical economists, but rather as performed
sets of practices of various actors (traders, investors, etc.) making use
of material environments, devices (trading floors, computers, tele-
communications) and conceptual tools such as mathematical
models. The point is that a combination of interaction with the
material world, cultural values, emotions and technical devices
contributes to producing the eventual outcomes.

EMOTION AND AFFECT

Emotions shape the nature of many aspects of social life, and

therefore have geographical impacts. The term ‘emotional geo-
graphy’ is used to describe how spatial knowledge of the world is
written with or on emotions, whereas a geography of emotions
168 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

relates to the mapping of different emotions and emotional states

(Parr 2005). The social world is ‘constructed and lived through
human emotions’, such as ‘pain, bereavement, fear, elation, anger,
love and so on … ’ (Anderson and Smith 2001). In general, human
geographers understand emotions as things people acquire through
culture that are bound up with conscious actions but also with the
experience of living. Social, cultural and feminist geographers have
been concerned with a wide range of different emotions and their
impacts that relate to the social and material world – emotions
impact not only on everyday life but on politics, warfare,
landscapes, the home, the built environment, etc.
Related is the concept of ‘affect’. This is an abstract and difficult
idea that refers to the way in which any representation fails to
capture completely the way in which social life is full of emotional
and constantly changed ‘lived experience’. Affect is therefore an
experiential phenomenon that attempts to understand how bodies
are altered by emotions (‘affected’) and also have emotional impacts
on (that is, ‘affect’) others. The important point is that this is not
just related to individuals but is a collective phenomenon in society.
Affect is therefore not a conscious or intended consequence of
social action but is just an unavoidable aspect of being alive. Human
geographers have sought to map ‘affect’ (Pile 2010), using both it
and ideas of emotion to understand, for example, the nature of
bodily movements in space and their relationship to emotions. Work
has looked at aspects of social life including dance, theatrical perfor-
mance and game-playing (Thrift 1997) (see box).

UNDERSTANDING ‘AFFECT’: THE CASE OF

COMPUTER GAMES
Most people have experienced playing a computer game that, in the
21st century, can immerse them in a complex alternative world. In
the last decade or more, of course, online games have allowed them
to play in virtual worlds with millions of other gamers on the inter-
net, often with an ‘avatar’. Examples include games such as World of
Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto or Second Life. These game worlds have a
virtual geography and spatiality, and illustrate well the relationship
between understanding such experiences as representations and the
usefulness of the concept of affect.
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 169

In this respect, Ian Shaw and Barney Warf (2009) argue that we
can understand video games as a kind of sensory commodity that
exposes players to a variety of affects – largely emotional feelings of
surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness and joy. They also arouse the
body: just watch someone playing and the expression on their face
as well as their behaviour. Shaw and Warf use this analysis to show
how capitalism (computer games are commodities you pay for) has
an emotional aspect that operates at the pre-cognitive (i.e. uncon-
scious) level as well as at a conscious level. The concept of affect
thus helps them understand how playing has impacts in the world
beyond the computer screens. Game designers now focus on the
emotional response to games, and the interactive embodied experi-
ence of playing a game involving shooting Arab (or ‘other’) enemies
has wider impacts on the social world (see section below on self and
other). Shaw and Warf (2009) argue that these game spaces are
increasingly ‘affective landscapes’ where, as a player turns their
attention to the experience of the space they are shaped not just by
the representations of those spaces but also by the body’s affective
articulation in another world. Computer games are experiential and
lived, and have to be understood as such, not just as representations.

IDENTITY
As the Introduction outlined, human geography today takes what is
known as a ‘non-essentialist’ approach to identity, theorizing our
identities as relational insofar as they are constructed in relation to how
we see similarities and differences in other people. This relational
perspective thus argues that no identity is ‘innate’ – that is it does
not exist automatically. This represents a rejection by human geography
today of earlier ideas about identity that saw them as being quite
‘fixed’ – you were a black person, a lesbian or middle class. Instead
geographers now view identity as being in a constant process of con-
struction and that people actually have multiple senses of identity.
You can take on the sense of being a national citizen, a woman, a stu-
dent, a tourist or any number of identities, and human geographers are
interested in how these are shaped both by imaginative geographies,
and the spatial context that people exist in. For example, if you live
170 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

in a European country, you may not have a particularly strong sense

of any Europeanness. However, if you take a holiday in China or
Japan, for a whole range of reasons you may feel more European
and identify with that identity. Related to this, geographers have
been particularly interested in wider social science debates about the
‘hybrid’ nature of identities that argue that all identities – like all
forms of culture – are hybrid mixtures that are in a constant state of
change.

SELF AND OTHER

The self is a concept that seeks to express the way that senses of
oneself are inevitably caught up in a relational process of definition
based on differences between the self and someone or something
else. The ‘other’ therefore refers in the abstract to a person or thing
that is opposite or different to oneself. In that sense, the description
of ‘otherness’ refers to the qualities that the other possesses that are
different from those of the self.
Human geography over the last two decades has become ever
more interested in taking the other seriously by thinking about
‘different kinds of people who are situated in different kinds of
spaces’ and places (Philo 1997, cited in Cloke 2005b). Key to this is
understanding how these others experience these spaces and places.
This breaks down what can be termed ‘“the arrogance of the self”,
that essentially corresponds to the assumption that others must see
the world the same way we do’ (Cloke 2005b: 69). It has been
argued that this amounts to being ‘locked in the thought-prison of
the “the same”’ (Philo 1997) – meaning essentially that it is often
almost impossible to appreciate the world from another person’s
perspective. The temptation is either to try to incorporate others
into our sameness, or to exclude them. Either activity is, of course,
a highly political action.
Geographical work has thus focused on producing knowledge of
a whole range of people who have been ‘othered’ and whose
experiences and worldview remain hidden from the supposedly
objective social science that characterized human geography prior
to the cultural turn. The other’s experience is different across space
and between places, as well as being shaped by certain geographical
way of imagining the world. Classic examples include people who
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 171

live in rural areas (Philo 1992) but also those excluded on grounds
of class, disability, age, race, gender, sexuality and so on.

GEOGRAPHIES OF GENDER

Work on gender in human geography began in the 1970s and

1980s with feminist geographical work that sought to expose the
disadvantaged position of women in society. Studies analysed, for
example, the exclusion of women from labour markets in different
places (Perrons 1995). It was also argued that, up until the 1980s, human
geography had largely ignored half of the social world by excluding
almost everything seen to be feminine (Monk and Hanson 1982).
They offered plenty of examples: childcare, women’s labour in the
home, voluntary work, caring for the elderly, subsistence ways of
making a living.
This kind of work has continued, but since the cultural turn the
scope of geographical work on gender has become much broader.
Feminist human geographers made extensive use of the feminist
argument that ‘rational knowledge is actually grounded in the
position of white, heterosexual men who tend to see other people
not like themselves only in terms of themselves’ (Rose 1993).
Geographers have sought to understand how women have been
excluded from – and also, perhaps most importantly, have trans-
formed what were understood to be – legitimate or worthwhile
topics of geographical knowledge beyond those earlier ‘feminine’
topics. Until the last couple of decades, the questions of sexuality
we consider below were regarded as inappropriate topics for human
geographical study (Longhurst 1997). Moreover, there is now a
large amount of work in human geography examining the geo-
graphical nature of gender differences in a variety of contexts.
During the 1990s, for example, social and cultural geographers
considered the gendered nature of landscape representation and
cartography (Rose 1993).
Questions of gender were also applied to traditional questions
dealt with by economic geographers. Beyond the scale of individual
bodies already considered (McDowell 1997), another good example
is the work of Gibson-Graham (1996), which controversially argues
that the kinds of classic representations of globalization discussed in
Chapter 2 were organized through masculine representations of
172 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

capitalism and a metaphor of penetration and rape of feminized,

vulnerably local economies (cited in Pratt 2005). The goal of
Gibson-Graham’s theorization of capitalism in this way is to break
down masculine discourses that give power to key actors in the global
economy (such as transnational corporations) by representing them as
masculine bodies, but it remains debatable whether it actually
succeeds in liberating alternative imaginings of the capitalist world.

GEOGRAPHIES OF SEXUALITY

Human geographical work on sexuality began in the 1970s by

trying to understand the development of ‘gay neighbourhoods’ in
the cities of the global North (Binnie and Valentine 1999). In this
work, geographers examined the factors that led to the clustering of
gay businesses (bars, clubs, shops) and drew gay men to these areas
(Winchester and White 1988). This led to an increasing interest
in the relationship between these gay spaces and capitalism in terms
of urban land markets and the deliberate marketing of certain areas
as ‘sexualized spaces’ (urban ‘gay districts’) (Binnie and Skeggs
2004).
However, since the cultural turn, geographical analysis of sexuality
has broadened considerably to consider how all forms of sexual
identities are shaped by social relations across space. It has also
become increasingly interested in the tendency of popular culture
to present heterosexuality as normal – termed ‘heteronormativity’.
In this second strand of work, human geographers have undertaken
a great deal of analysis concerning what it means to be heterosexual
(straight), bisexual, lesbian or gay and how this varies across time
and space (and therefore between places). It is also often argued that
human geography in effect took a ‘queer turn’ as this body of work
mushroomed in the 1990s (Browne 2006). Good examples of this
kind of work include Gill Valentine’s study of lesbian experiences
in the urban landscape (Valentine 1993) or Kath Browne’s more
recent work on lesbian and gay spaces of leisure such as music festivals
(Browne et al. 2009).
A third aspect to geographical thinking about sexuality has been
to begin to broaden out the scope of analysing othered sexual
identities (lesbian, gay, bisexual) to think about the ‘same’ –
heterosexuality. Social geographers became interested in marginal
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 173

forms of heterosexuality. This includes a growing amount of work

on prostitution (Hubbard 2004), which has examined, for example,
how sex work is important in shaping the nature of districts and
neighbourhoods in city spaces (see box). Other work has looked at
sex tourism and its role in shaping the nature of certain tourist
destinations (Jacobs 2010) in addition to research that examines the
differences in the nature of heterosexuality in different places – for
example, what it means to be heterosexual in a rural as opposed to
an urban space (Little 2003). More recently, human geographers
have become increasingly interested in what we can term ‘moral’
forms of sexuality and the impact of these discourses on politics,
practices and the built environment.
Finally, geographies of sexuality over the last decade have broadened
the analysis of sexuality to a whole string of wider issues addressed
by social, cultural, political, urban and economic geographers.
Geographers have begun to analyse, for example, the significance of
non-heterosexual consumers in the global economy, the significance
of lesbian and gay political networks and their emerging trans-
nationality and the politics of homosexuality in global religious
networks (Vanderbeck et al. 2011). Human geography is thus
increasingly integrating the analysis of sexual identities into an analysis
of every aspect of social life and its spatiality.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES: THE POLITICS OF

PROSTITUTION IN LONDON AND PARIS
Many large cities across the planet have ‘red light districts’, where
there is prostitution (sex work), and many of these districts have
existed for centuries. Such areas are often regarded as undesirable
features of cities, associated with illegal activity, exploitation and a
threat to public order. But in the 21st century, there are dynamic
politics around sex work, which have become very evident in large
capital cities such as London and Paris. In both cities over the last
decade, authorities have tried to clamp down and prevent prostitu-
tion in even the long-established areas – Soho in London and the
Pigalle and Bois de Boulogne areas in Paris.
The urban geographer Phil Hubbard has examined the develop-
ment of ‘zero tolerance’ policies by urban authorities to sex work
(Hubbard 2003). City governments imposed new, steep fines and the
174 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

threat of imprisonment in an attempt to ‘clean up’ these red light

districts. Hubbard explores the contested politics of public space in
these cities that has emerged, exploring the motives for trying to
exclude sex workers and the political reaction and protests this has
produced from the sex workers themselves. In Britain and France,
sex workers have formed unions and mounted protests against the
increasing criminalization of prostitution. Hubbard argues that the
new ‘zero tolerance’ strategies are closely related to capitalist strate-
gies to market districts such as Soho in London around a family-
friendly conception of sexualized space. In this way, he shows how
moral discourses about sex are caught up in the nature of public
spaces, in urban politics and in the urban economy.

GEOGRAPHIES OF RACE

As a category, race is an idea that distinguishes between people on

the basis of physical differences secondary to their bodies. The most
obvious is skin colour, but other characteristics are also associated
with it (a person’s hair or physical characterisics). Historically, race
was of course linked to notions of the racial superiority of ‘white’
Europeans through the period of colonial expansion from the 16th
to the 19th centuries. Although any biological basis to any strict
division of human beings into different races has long since been
discredited, the category of course persists as a political and cultural
construct. In particular, it forms the basis for ‘racism’, which is a
political ideology of difference between individuals.
Within human geography, work on race has to a large extent
mirrored that on those ‘othered’ identities we have been discussing
insofar as it began with a consideration of racial identities which are
not the ‘same’ (in this case ‘white’). At least three main strands of
work on the geographies of race are worth identifying. The first of
these is similar to that on sexual identity insofar as human geo-
graphers have been concerned to map, analyse and understand the
nature of racial segregation within certain spaces: most notably, cities,
regions and nations. In a straightforward way, human geographers
have mapped how certain racially categorized social groups are
concentrated in specific areas. In this respect, there is a considerable
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 175

amount of work on ‘ghettoization’ in cities of the global North

where ethnic minority groups are concentrated in areas of high
unemployment, urban deprivation and poor state services (Nayak
2003). Human geographers have also been interested in how
certain ethnic groups become trapped in ‘racialized’ spaces that
prevent them from taking up new opportunities elsewhere when
they arise. For example, many of the poor black communities that
were worst affected by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005
were unable to move to new lives and employment opportunities
elsewhere in the US (such as California).
A second strand of work is more concerned with the relationship
between different forms of geographical knowledge and imaginaries
about places or environments and ideas about race. For example,
Sibley (1999) argues that way in which ‘whiteness’ is equated with
purity, order and cleanliness in European cultures has produced the
negative stereotypes that exists of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Indians
and Roma gypsies. The argument is that each has been constructed
as a marginal threat within various nationalisms, which itself has
fuelled spatial segregation. Finally, a third aspect of human geo-
graphers’ interest in race concerns the different experience of
people of racial identity in different spaces and places. This has
examined, for example, how being ‘black’ or ‘white’ in certain
urban areas leads to fear and anxiety. White people may feel
threatened in the ‘black inner city’, but conversely black people
often experience similar feelings of anxiety in ‘white’ rural spaces in
northern Europe or North America. A growing amount of more
recent work has also been particularly concerned with the experience
of ‘whiteness’ in particular times, places and spaces (Bonnett 2008)

CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES

Human geography during the 1990s saw a rapid growth in interest

in age, and in particular in the experience of children. The reason
was largely a realization that the subject had ignored the very dif-
ferent lived experiences of children and young people in terms of
space and place. Again, human geographers see the identity of being a
child as something that is socially constructed, not some pure biologi-
cal category (James et al. 1998). The qualities of what it means to
be a child have therefore varied over time and between places, and
176 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

human geographers have been concerned with the ‘place-specific’

nature of being a child, exposing many of the everyday assumptions
people hold about childhood as being particular to the West and
Europe. Examples would be the way children are less able and
competent than adults and therefore need to be educated how to
become adults, or how young children are ‘innocent’ and free from
the responsibilities that adults have. These are culturally specific
assumptions and do not really hold for the way children’s identities
are constructed in many countries in the global South. In fact, in
the global South, many children make crucial and important eco-
nomic and social contributions to family livelihoods through
domestic, agricultural and all kinds of paid work (Punch 2001).
Human geographers have also examined in some depth the kinds
of everyday spaces around which children’s identities are con-
structed. They argue that all kinds of spaces continually produce
and reproduce ideas about what it means to be a child. Think about
the way ideas of what childhood means are expressed in the design
and use made of the built environment. This of course applies to all
kinds of spaces: homes, schools, leisure areas. Another dimension to
this is the relationship of children to public space, with children seen
as being both vulnerable in such spaces and also a threat to adult
control when being unruly (for example, teenagers riding skateboards).

SUMMARY
This chapter has:

 Considered how human geographers have theorized the body in

terms of bodies as spaces, bodies occupying space and bodies as
spatialized projects;
 Discussed the growing significance of concepts of practice,
performance and performativity in human geography;
 Examined the way in which human geography has become
increasingly interested in the emotions and made use of the
concept of affect to overcome the limitations of textual, visual
and linguistic representation to know the social world;
 Further explored the conception of identity, self and other used
in human geography, in particular examining how various
identities based on gender, race, sexuality and age are socially
 BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES 177

constructed and have a range of impacts on geographical

knowledge and social life.

FURTHER READING
Brown, K., Lim, J. and Browne, G. (2009) Geographies of Sexualities: Theories,
Practices and Political. Aldershot: Ashgate.
This is a good and up-to-date collection of essays on different aspects of the
analysis of sexuality in human geography today.

Dwyer, C. and Bressey, C. (eds) (2008) New Geographies of Race and Racism.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
This is good collection of essays about the way race is being analysed in human
geography, although the examples are mostly drawn from the UK and Ireland.

Holt, L. (ed.) (2011) Children’s Geographies: An International Perspective. London:

Routledge.
The Introduction to this book gives a good overview on the current state of
human geographical work on children’s geographies with very good chapters
on youth identity and families in the collection.

Valentine, G. (2001) Chapter 2 on ‘The Body’ in Social Geographies: Society and

Space. Harlow: Prentice Hall.
Although a few years old now, this book remains one of the most comprehen-
sive texts on social geography with the section on the body being particularly
useful.

WEB RESOURCES
Many of the debates that geographers make use of about gender as ‘perfor-
mance’ are the subject of wider debates in social science and policy thought.
This website provides an introduction to these discussions: www.genderforum.
org/home/
An interesting research centre at the University of Natal concerned with race
and identity: http://ccrri.ukzn.ac.za/
 8

CONCLUDING OVERVIEW: HUMAN

GEOGRAPHY TODAY

This book began by arguing that human geography is perhaps

unique among the social sciences in its breadth and scope. It is also
distinctive in being a ‘half discipline’, tied closely to the natural
science focus of physical geography. Yet, as pointed out in the
Introduction, geography as a discipline (and human geography as
part of it) has sometimes been criticized for being too diverse. One
of the central aims of this book has been to dispel this idea. The
numerous sub-disciplinary areas in human geography (cultural,
political economic, urban geography and so on) do sometimes give
this impression. Likewise the enormous number of topics that
human geographers research undeniably reveals enormous diversity,
but what the preceding chapters have sought to do is demonstrate
how this diversity does not equate to incoherence. This book has
provided what is undoubtedly a rollercoaster ride through a wide
range of topics that also almost all concern other social science dis-
ciplines in one way or another. Yet what holds them together is
what we have called a geographical imagination: a focus on the
spatiality of social life and on the way social phenomena relate to each
other across space. In this respect, you should end this book with a
good understanding of how the various sub-disciplinary areas in
human geography are actually very closely entwined together. The way
‘economic’ geographers theorize the nature of firms in the global
 CONCLUDING OVERVIEW 179

economy today is increasingly caught up in the theoretical arguments

made by social and cultural geographers regarding practice, perfor-
mance, identity and emotion. Equally, the traditional concerns of
‘development geographers’ around places in the global South have
become blurred with many of the concerns found in other sub-
disciplinary areas of the subject: for example, the significance of
innovation and creativity in economic development or the emergence
of transnational political networks.
Human geography is, therefore, a discipline whose power and
significance lies in the kind of interdisciplinarity that is so often
called for in other subjects. Economists, it is sometimes argued,
need to appreciate matters from a sociological perspective. Business
and management theorists need to engage with the ideas of
anthropologists. Human geography does this almost as matter of
course, because of its underlying cross-disciplinary range of interests.
In this respect, it is, I would maintain, one of the most exciting and
innovative of social science subjects.

CURRENT RESEARCH THEMES IN HUMAN

GEOGRAPHY
Here it is obviously impossible to provide an overview of the many
areas of research being undertaken by human geographers at pre-
sent. Instead what I want to do is conclude this book with an
indication of some of the major themes that characterize research in
human geography in the early 21st century. These will at least give
you an idea of the kinds of research topics you would encounter if
you were to go to an international conference on the subject
tomorrow. Even this list of themes cannot claim to be compre-
hensive, but it does at least provide a flavour of some of the most
significant research areas human geographers are engaged in and
their enormous relevance to the wider world. They are not listed in
any particular order of priority either as all of these themes relate to
important challenges facing the world.
First, as should be obvious from the discussion in Chapters 2 and 3,
human geographical research is currently concerned with the future
uneven development of the global capitalist economy. Aside from
examining the nature of firms, industries and regional economies,
geographers are investigating the discourses that frame ideas of how
180 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

the global economy should work in researching the ideology of

neoliberalism. Research is also concerned to understand how the
global financial system operates, whether it could lead to a global
economic collapse, and what this means for social justice and
equality across the planet. Equally, geographical research is interested
in the operation of capitalism itself: how the economy innovates, the
experience of workers in different regions and the complex rela-
tionship between consumption, culture and what products and
services are created. At a smaller scale, however, human geography
has enormous relevance and utility for anyone thinking about how
to better manage regions, cities and localities. Much work in eco-
nomic geography is very closely aligned to questions of what causes
economic decline, and how economic success in a global capitalist
economy can be generated in different places.
Related to this is the substantial research considering shifts in
geopolitical power worldwide and the ongoing transformation of
what was once called ‘the developing world’. Human geographers
have been researching the nature of development in Africa, Asia
and Latin America for more than a century, but today this research
is concerned more with new questions of increasingly wealthier and
more globalized societies in the global South. Human geography
has addressed in its research the extent to which China and India
are becoming global superpowers, but also why many African
countries have been left behind compared with their economic
success in the last three decades. Equally important at the local scale
are the transformations occurring to communities across the world
as a consequence of wider globalization processes, and much geo-
graphical research today is examining how identities, cultural ideas,
politics and social values are changing. Political geographers also
continue to research the changing nature of international politics,
including an understanding of political resistance, and by what
means global society changes and develops.
Another major theme of geographical research concerns the
global environment and the politics that surround this. Human
geographers are at the forefront of research into the politics of climate
change, examining, for example, what kinds of strategies and gov-
ernment policies are likely to succeed in managing its effects in
different regions around the world. That includes research on the
development of sustainable energy sources, sustainable cities, a
 CONCLUDING OVERVIEW 181

low-carbon economy and sustainable agriculture and food produc-

tion. Research in human geography is also concerned with many
more different kinds of environmental challenges: resource man-
agement, the preservation of global biodiversity and pollution and
waste management. Many of these research topics link to the
research undertaken by physical geographers.
Fourth, much research in human geography remains firmly con-
cerned with issues of social justice and inequality. Aside from
research into how capitalism produces and reproduces social inequal-
ities, human geographers continue to be concerned with social
justice linked to those questions of identity (race, gender, sexuality,
age, etc.) discussed in Chapter 7. Geographers research such ques-
tions at a range of scales from the level of cities to global politics.
Part of this research is also concerned with more conceptual and
theoretical questions about those issues of representation, subjectivity
and the nature of human knowledge of the world discussed in this
book. Such research is perhaps less immediately applicable at first
sight to government policies but plays an important role in generating
new ideas about the nature of social life. Such ideas and theories often
have unknown and unintended positive consequences as they filter
out into the wider society. Human geographers working in these
areas are thus contributing to a wider body of research in the social
sciences and humanities that contributes to an ongoing shift in the
cultural and social values that people share across the globe.
Research that, for example, exposes the Western-centric nature of
knowledge helps shift our understanding of cultures themselves and
produces new kinds of political agendas.
Finally, a variety of research across human geography is concerned
with the dramatic impact of new forms of information and com-
munication technologies. In the 21st century, the pace of change is
unprecedented as mobile web devices, social networking and geo-
locational technologies transform the way we live. Think of the
impact of Facebook or Twitter – or of GPS technologies such as
satnavs – on all aspects of social life. People are living their lives
differently and experiencing space differently. Even recent ideas like
that of virtual space have become inadequate very quickly, as new
and complex forms of human technological interactions develop.
The use of Twitter has become routine, changing the nature of
politics, political action, news, social protest, marketing and all
182 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS

kinds of practices. The nature of the Arab Spring uprisings across

the Middle East in 2011, which made heavy use of new web
media, would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier.
Research across the many sub-disciplines of human geography is
becoming ever more preoccupied with these transformations, and
geographical thinking offers a potentially powerful means to better
understand the implications and impacts of these technological
changes on today world.
These are just a limited number of the current research areas in
human geography. More could be added, but that is beyond the
scope of what this book is about. Its task has been to provide a
crash course in human geography. At times this has undoubtedly
meant doing the subject some injustice, either by leaving important
topics out or by simplifying complex ideas. And in no sense has this
overview of human geography been exhaustive. Rather, the book
is meant to have served as a starting point for you, the reader. Its
main aim is to give you an overall taste of this diverse social science
subject, and inspire you to study it further. I hope you will discover
how rewarding that can be.
 GLOSSARY

Actor-network theory (ANT): A theoretical approach that sees all

things in the world (in abstract terms) as made up of many dif-
ferent connections (translations, associations, mediations) to other
things (people, objects, etc.). ANT questions key assumptions in
Western knowledge about the conceptual boundaries between
categories: humans/objects; nature/culture; tradition/ modernity.
It argues that such conceptual divisions stop us seeing the world as
it really is: a collection of diverse interconnected things in a
constant state of being created.
Annihilation of space by time: The idea, associated with the
work of Karl Marx, that the circulation of capital makes time the
fundamental dimension of social life in its quest for profit. Space
is ‘annihilated’ because the distance between, for example, mar-
kets for commodities matters less than the time it takes to get
those commodities to market. Under capitalism, space is
thus used, created and dominated to fit into the strict temporal
constraints that the profitable circulation of capital requires.
Alternative food networks: A response to conventional food
chains dominated by supermarkets and transnational firms in
which local food producers market foodstuffs through alternative
outlets (such as farmers’ markets or home delivery).
Avant-garde: Used in English to describe works or groups at the
forefront of new innovation, particularly in art, culture or politics.
184 GLOSSARY

Baden-Württemberg: One of the 16 states in Germany, in the

south-west of the country.
Birth rate: The number of childbirths per 1,000 people in a
population each year.
Bonds: Certificates that represent money a government or a corpora-
tion has borrowed. Once issued they can be traded in a ‘secondary
market’ like shares.
British Empire: All the territories governed by Britain from the
beginning of western European colonialism in the 16th century
to the early 20th century. The British Empire varied in size over
this period but was largest during the 19th century, when its ter-
ritory included all the major continental land masses. At its
height, it was the largest empire to have existed, accounting for
around 450 million people and a quarter of the planet’s land area.
Buffer zone: In Mackinder’s Heartland thesis, these consisted of
states not allied to one of the Great Powers and often lying between
them as neutral territories that were the object of diplomatic
manipulation.
Classical social theories: Works of historical thinkers that led to
modern social science subjects including sociology, economics,
politics and human geography from the late 18th century. Key
thinkers in the 19th century include Auguste Comte, Karl Marx,
Emile Durkheim and (later) Max Weber.
Colonialism: In general terms, this refers to the establishment and
maintenance of colony territories in one area by people from
another area of the world. Historically, the period from the late
15th until the 20th century is described as the ‘colonial period’.
Containment theory: A theory of foreign policy developed by
the US from the mid-1940s that used military, economic and
diplomatic means to prevent the spread of communism as a
political system during the Cold War.
Communist Cuba: After a three-year rebellion, a revolutionary
force established a communist government in 1959 on the
Caribbean island of Cuba. Led for most of this time by the rebel
leader Fidel Castro, Cuba remains a communist state outside of
the global capitalist economy.
Corporate governance: The mechanisms by which firms are
managed and run including the interaction of boards of directors,
shareholders and external regulation.
 GLOSSARY 185

Cultural turn: An intellectual shift that brought issues of culture to

forefront of debates in human geography and other social science
disciplines.
Cultural anthropology: A branch of anthropology that focuses
on the cultural variation between human societies in different
places around the world.
Death rate: The number of deaths per 1,000 people in a population
per year.
Derivatives: In finance, a product which is derived from an
underlying asset (such as a share), that has no value in itself but is
essentially a contract between two parties that specifies a set of
conditions under which a payment will be made.
Domino effect: The idea within containment theory that if, for
example, one state becomes communist, then neighbouring states
are also likely to follow suit.
Ecosystem: A biological environment consisting of all the living
organisms in a particular area along with the physical components
of that environment (such as air, water, soil, light).
Ecotourism: Tourism in fragile or pristine areas of the world
where ecosystems are protected, which intends to have a low
impact on environments. It is often small in scale and intended as
an alternative to commercial tourism
Economic sociology: This interdisciplinary field of social science
adopts a different approach to the positivist models of neoclassical
economies. It is concerned with the social consequences of eco-
nomic exchanges, the social meanings they involve and the social
interactions they facilitate or obstruct.
Environmental degradation: Refers to any change to an envir-
onment that humans regard as destructive or deleterious (which,
of course, makes it a subjective judgement). Examples would
include ecosystem destruction, species extinction or the depletion
of natural resources.
Embodied space: A concept that seeks to capture how human
experience and consciousness takes on material and spatial form
through the nature of our bodies’ existence in the world.
Fascist/Fascism: A radical political ideology that has many diverse
forms but is generally associated with authoritarian rule, strong
nationalism and usually an exclusionary sense of identity based on
imagined community, ancestry, culture and race.
186 GLOSSARY

Financialization: A process where the economy becomes

increasingly focused on profit made through financial channels
rather than on commodity production or trade. It refers to the
growing importance of financial markets, institutions, motives
and elites in society.
Flexibilization: A process generally applied to a set of different
changes to the nature of production associated with, for example,
in manufacturing, new kinds of adaptable machinery to enable
different models of goods to be produced and the use of part-
time, contract and temporary labour to allow companies to
respond to rapidly changing markets for their goods.
French Revolution: Sometimes known as the first French
Revolution (there were later ones), the bloody revolution of
1789 saw the end of absolute monarchy in France and the
foundation of a French Republic.
G8: The group of seven major economies founded in
France in 1975 consisted of Canada, Italy, (West) Germany,
Japan, the UK and the US. Russia joined in 1997 to become
the G8.
Gentrification: An urban process whereby old residential housing
or other buildings are upgraded and renovated by new owners in
an urban district. In residential areas, this often involves change in
the demographic character of a district.
German Ruhr: An urban area in north-west Germany along the
River Rhine containing several large cities that have experienced
deindustrialization (such as Essen and Dortmund).
Global North: A more recent term for what was previously
described as the wealther ‘First World’ or ‘advanced economies’
(including wealthier economies in other regions outside the
northern hemisphere such as Japan and Australia).
Global South: A more recent term for what was previously
described as the ‘Third World’ or ‘developing economies’.
Global village: Closely associated with the writer Marshall
McLuhan and his book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), the idea
denotes how the world is becoming a small place through, in
particular, technology-facilitated globalization.
Global commodity/global value chain: A network of labour
and production processes whose end result is a finished product
or commodity.
 GLOSSARY 187

Greenhouse gas: A gas within the Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs

and emits within the thermal infrared range, and is responsible for a
warming effect. Key gases include water vapour and carbon dioxide.
Gross Domestic Product: The market value of all goods and
services produced by a country in a given period.
Guerrilla resistance: A form of resistance, usually military, where
a small number of combatants – that often includes non-profes-
sional armed individuals – use military tactics (such as ambushes
and raids) alongside surprise and mobility to resist a larger and less
mobile traditional army or force.
(Persian) Gulf War: A UN-authorized war against Iraq between
1990 and 1991, led by the US and other allies in response to the
invasion and annexation of Kuwait.
Hedonism: A school of thought that argues pleasure is the only
intrinsic good in the world and therefore strives for it above all else.
Holocaust: Literally meaning ‘catastrophe’, this refers to the gen-
ocide of around 6 million European Jews and millions of other
social groups in a systematic programme of state-sponsored
murder by Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
Homogeneity: A state whereby things or places are increasingly
similar until they become indistinguishable from each other.
Humanism: A worldview, philosophy and/or practice that focuses
on human concerns and affirms some concept of human nature.
Hybrid/hybridity: The product of a combination of things that
are distinct, originating from biology (for example, plants) but used
in human geography in relation to meaning, culture, values, etc.
Industrial Revolution: A period in which fundamental changes
occurred in agriculture, textile and metal manufacture, transporta-
tion, economic policies and the social structure. This transformation
began in Britain in the 18th century, continuing into the 19th
and spreading to Europe, North America, Japan and subsequently
the rest of the world.
Informationalization: the process by which economies, cultures
and societies have become increasingly oriented around knowledge
and information as organising factors.
International Criminal Court: A permanent tribunal founded in
2002 by treaty charged with prosecuting individuals for war
crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It is located in
The Hague.
188 GLOSSARY

International Monetary Fund: Founded in 1945, this is an

intergovernmental organization that aims to foster economic
cooperation with a particular focus on policies that affect cur-
rency exchange rates and the balance of payments. Its stated aim
is to foster economic stability and growth.
IRA: The name of several military organizations aimed at bringing
about a united Irish nation-state. In the later 20th century, the
Provisional IRA used both violence and political methods to seek
this goal.
Korean War: Beginning in June 1950 with an armistice signed in
1953, a war between the UN-backed South Korea and Chinese-
backed North Korea. The war resulted in the division of capi-
talist South Korea from communist North Korea along the 38th
parallel of latitude.
Kyoto Protocol: Adopted in 1997, this is an international treaty
aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will
prevent dangerous levels of human-induced global warming. By
2011, 191 countries had signed the treaty.
Living standards/standard of living: The level of well-being of
an individual usually measured in economic terms by income or
output per person and associated with (but not necessarily
equivalent to) their quality of life.
Modernity: A state of society that is post-tradition and can be
traced back historically to the 16th and 17th centuries, associated
with the emergence of capitalism, industrialization, rational
scientific thought and the devlopment of nation-states and their
associated institutions.
Mutually assured destruction (MAD): An aspect of military
ideology that is based on the idea that two opposing forces using
weapons of mass destruction (i.e. nuclear weapons) will lead to
the total annihilation of both attacker and defender, thus acting as
a deterrent to conflict.
New social movements: A range of issue-based movements that
have emerged in Western societies since the 1960s and that
exist within civil society rather than in the formal political
institutions of nation-states (such as environmental or civil rights
movements).
Non-representational theories: Attempts to theorize the social
world as ‘mobile practices’ that focus on the potential of the flow
 GLOSSARY 189

of events in the moment rather than on static models of thought

and action that dominate conventional social science.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD): An international economic organization of 34 countries
founded in 1961 with the aim of promoting economic growth
and development.
Orient: A historical European representation of the Eastern world
from the Middle East and encompassing all of Asia.
Outer rim: In Mackinder’s Heartland thesis, states outside the core
of the world geopolitical map including the USA and Japan.
Patriarchy/patriarchal structures: A system of social structures and
practices through which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.
Phenomenology: A strand of continental European philosophy
that centres on the significance of reflecting how the world can
be understood through intellectual inquiry, especially in relation
to the key role played by language.
Pivot area: In Mackinder’s Heartland thesis, this was land locked
central Asia including eastern Europe and was important as
whoever controlled it would have the balance of global power.
Political economy: A diverse theoretical tradition that is critical
of neoclassical economics and often (but not always) draws on
Marxism to view the nature of economic activity as a politicised
object of study.
Postcolonialism: A critical perspective concerned with the con-
sequences of colonialism and its contestation on the peoples of
both colonized and colonizing countries in the past, including
representations and practices in the present.
Postmodern: Literally meaning ‘after the modern’, this a term that
is used loosely to refer to an artistic movement, a state of society,
and a condition of the philosophy of knowledge.
Poststructuralist: A term used to describe a group of French
philosophers since the late 1970s who, while rejecting this label,
all based their ideas on the common themes of rejecting a struc-
turalist view of language and of an essentialized human subject.
Positivism: A philosophy of science that originated from Auguste
Comte (1798–1857) that distinguishes it from metaphysics and
religion through a prioritization of observation or accessible
experience of the world (empiricism) and the construction of
theories on that basis.
190 GLOSSARY

Positionality: The idea that where an individual is located in

social structures and institutions affects how they understand the
world.
Productivity: A measure of output relative to input which is
usually expressed as the ratio of the returns from sales to the costs
of production.
Psychoanalytic theories: founded in the work of Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939), this broad range of theory is concerned with the
nature of human subjectivity.
Qualitative methods: A set of research tools that seek to reveal
how the world is viewed, experienced and constructed by social
actors. It includes interviews, focus groups, participant observation
and textual interpretation.
Quantitative methods: A set of research tools that use mathe-
matical and statistical techniques to develop theories and proofs
of social phenomena.
Silicon Valley: The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area in
California, US, which has an historic concentration of many of
the world’s leading technology companies.
Socioeconomics: A broad term to describe theoretical approaches
to understanding economic activity that involves social factors
such as values, meanings and norms (as opposed to the approach
of mainstream neoclassical economics).
Sovereign debt: Public or national debt that nation-state
governments owe.
Spaceship Earth: An idea that became popular from the 1960s
when the first images of Earth from space were taken. Often
associated with the Green movement’s worldview of Earth as a
single, contained, living organic system bounded in space.
Spatiality: The socially produced nature of space.
Spin-off firms: New firms that are formed by former employees
of an existing firm based on a new idea or aspect of the existing
firm’s activity.
Subjectivity: The property of human beings that leads to their
sense of identity and understanding of what the world ‘is’.
Surplus value: Developed significantly by Marx and in Marxist
thinking, this idea refers to the additional value created by
workers when they produce a good or service in excess of the
cost of their own labour and other inputs.
 GLOSSARY 191

Time-space convergence/compression: A decrease in what is

known as the friction of (or barriers/problems created by) dis-
tance between places often associated with improvements in
transport and communication. The related idea of ‘convergence’
adds to this an experiential aspect as we feel the world becoming
smaller (and is linked to Marxist thinking).
Trade justice: A concept and civil society campaign to change the
rules of global trade so that poorer countries and people benefit,
based on the view that current trade reflects an unfair advantage
to the richer and more powerful nations.
Total global output: The sum of all the goods and services produced
by the global economy.
UN Security Council: One of the key bodies within the UN
charged with maintaining international peace and security, and
with the authority to authorize sanctions and military action.
Underdevelopment: A lack of development, usually applied to
countries or regions, and based on the historical comparison with
a subjective view of a greater degree of development.
Vietnam War: A Cold War military conflict between the US and
non-communist allies and North Vietnamese communist groups
and their allies. The war encompassed contemporary Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia and lasted from 1955 to 1975.
Western imperialism: The creation and reproduction of unequal
relationships between Western states and others in Africa, Asia and
the Americas that are based on domination and subordination.
World Bank: Created in 1944, this is an international financial
institution charged with providing loans to developing countries
to finance capital investment programmes.
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 INDEX

9/11 attacks 74 ancient Greece 1, 63

Andersen, Hans Christian 63
actor-network theory (ANT) 13, Anderson, Benedict 14, 65
166, 183 annihilation of space by time 23, 183
Adams, Bill 14 anti-globalization movement 39,
Adidas 78 52–54
advanced economies see global North Apple 22, 77–78
advertising 37, 54, 78, 100, 104, Arab Spring 182
108–9, 111, 163 Argentina 31, 113
affect 13, 167–69 Asheim, Bjorn 13
Afghanistan 149 Association of Japanese
ageing populations 137 Geographers 6
agency 17–18 Association of South East Asian
agglomeration 93, 98–100, 102–3, Nations (ASEAN) 71
120 asylum 146–50
agriculture 7, 26, 42, 87–88, Australia 28, 36, 81, 86, 89, 107,
112–15, 156–57, 176 117, 145, 163, 186
aid agencies 136 Austria 71, 93
AIDS 135–36 Austro-Hungarian empire 64
air travel 23, 68–69, 81, 101, 110 authenticity of place 152–53
Airbus 110 automobile industry 37, 94, 96–98,
al-Qaeda 74 106–9
alternative food networks 114, 183 avant-garde 83, 183
American National Geographic
Society 6 Baden-Württemberg 97, 184
Amnesty International 29 bankruptcy 45–46, 106
200 INDEX

banks 37, 43, 45–46, 110, 120, 51, 53–54; free market capitalism
165 24–25, 50, 69, 73; Marx’s theory
Barnes, Trevor 13 of 26–27
Barnett, C. 124 Carrefour 38–39, 114
Bauman, Zymunt 13 casinos 80–81
Bear Stearns 46 Castells, Manuel 13, 120
Beck, Ulrich 14 Castro, Fidel 184
Belgium 71 Chad 150
Berkeley school 83 charities 29, 42, 110
Berry, Brian 13 Chernobyl nuclear accident 59
bin Laden, Osama 74 children’s geographies 175–76
biotechnology 97–98 Chile 31
birth rate 127, 129, 131–32, China 3, 28, 32, 39, 41, 44, 67, 73,
135–37, 184; see also population 95, 106, 114, 130, 170, 180, 188;
density Chinese Empire 23, 27, 64
Black Atlantic 142–43 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) 59
BMW 106, 108 Christaller, Walter 8, 14, 118
bodies 15, 160–61, 185; in space Chrysler 96–97
164–65; as spaces 161–62; as Citibank 46
spacialized projects 162–63 cities 16, 44, 55, 57, 75, 80, 82–83,
bonds 43–44, 184 87–88, 109, 115, 145, 175,
Bonfire of the Vanities, The 165 180–81, 186; urban politics
border controls 71 123–25; urban regeneration
Bosch 106 82–83, 121–23; urban systems
Boschma, Ron 13 118–21; urbanization 88, 115–18,
Botswana 136 123
boycotts 39 citizenship 124, 138–41, 150
branding 53–54, 78–79 civil rights movements 124, 139,
Brazil 44, 113 188
Britain see UK civil wars 32, 46, 52, 139, 149–50
British Empire 30, 66, 85, 145, 184 Clark, Gordon 13
Browne, Cath 172 class 11, 17, 123, 151, 157, 169, 171
Brundtland Commission 57–59 classical social theories 25, 184
buffer zones 30, 184 climate change 2, 23, 35, 57, 59–60,
Bulgaria 71 124, 188; see also greenhouse gases
Burgess, Ernest 14, 116–17 Cloke, Paul 13
Bush, George W. 57, 74 clusters 13, 92, 98–100, 102–3, 112
Butler, Judith 14, 167 codified knowledge 101, 103
Cold War 31–33, 72–73, 184, 191
Cambodia 191 Colombia 52
Canada 89, 148, 186 colonialism 8–9, 76, 80, 153, 184;
Capital Culture 165 see also postcolonialism
capitalism 9, 11, 16–17, 24–27, communism 24, 28, 31–33, 49, 51,
31–32, 45, 63, 70, 77, 80, 93, 95, 71, 73, 184–85, 191; see also Cold
123, 128, 169, 172, 174, 179–81, War
183, 188; and development 49, Communist Manifesto, The 26
 INDEX 201
commuting 144–45 Deleuze, Gilles 13
competitiveness 99, 101, 103 Dell 101
computer games 79, 111–12, 156, democracies 39, 63, 124, 138
168–69 Demographic Transition Model
Comte, Auguste 184, 189 130–32
conflict 30, 67, 72, 139, 148–50; see Denmark 71
also security; wars derivatives 44, 46, 185
Constable, John 85 Derrida, Jacques 13
consumption practices 39, 41, 54, Descartes, René 161
58, 75, 77–78; of space and place Detroit 39, 96–98
79–83 developing economies 27, 41, 45,
containment theory 31, 184–85; see 49, 115, 180; see also global South
also Cold War development 48–50; post-
Corbridge, Stuart 14 development 50–52; resistance to
corporate governance 35, 184 52–54
Cosgrave, Denis 14 diasporas 141–43, 150–51
counterurbanization 116 Dicken, Peter 13, 36, 69, 103, 105
Cox, Kevin 14 dictatorships 31; see also Nazi
Crang, M. 80 Germany
creative industries 109, 111–12, 179 Dictionary of Human Geography 5
credit crunch see financial crisis disability 164, 171
(2007–9) disease 51, 131, 162
crime 96–97, 122, 187 Disney World 80
critical geopolitics 32–33 domino effect 31, 185
Cuba 24, 31, 184 Driver, F. 77
cultural anthropology 86, 185 Durkheim, Emile 13, 184
cultural turn 10–12, 18–19, 32, 51,
75, 84, 91, 166, 171–72, 185 Earth Summit 59
culture 19, 39–40, 62, 68, 70, 75, EasyJet 101
81–82, 91–92, 102, 112, 114, ecology 58
134, 137, 163, 175, 180–81, 185, economic crisis see financial crisis
187; cultural diversity 41, 79, 135; (2007–9)
imaginative geographies 76–77; economic geography 3, 5, 7, 17–20,
popular culture 33, 63, 75 25, 38, 43, 45, 69, 91, 93–94, 98,
Cyprus 71 100, 109, 178–79; global
production networks (GPNs)
Davis, Mike 14 40–41, 47, 106; see also
death rate 127, 129, 131–32, geo-economics
136–37, 185; see also population economic sociology 102, 185
density ecosystems 57, 185
debt 44–46; Jubilee Debt Campaign ecotourism 152–54, 185
42, 53; Latin American debt crisis edge cities 117–18
52; sovereign debt 45, 190 embeddedness 41, 102–3
‘deep green’ approach 58 embodied space 15, 185; see also
deindustrialization 39, 82, 95–98, bodies
105, 116, 121–23, 186 emotions 167–69, 179
202 INDEX

employment 155–58; see also food production 112–15, 130

unemployment Ford 37, 94, 96–97, 106
Engels, Friedrich 26 Ford, Henry 107
England see UK Fordist manufacturing 107, 116–17
Enlightenment 65 Foucault, Michel 13, 18, 32–33, 51
environmental issues 54–57, 114, France 64, 70–71, 78, 80, 93, 106,
130, 151–52, 154, 180–81, 185, 135, 137, 148–49, 173–74, 186;
188; climate change 2, 23, 35, 57, French Revolutions 65, 73, 186
59–60, 124, 188; global free market capitalism 24–25, 50,
environmental politics 59–60; 69, 73
pollution 87, 181; sustainability 2, free trade 24–25, 42, 71
14, 57–59, 124, 130, 180–81 French Revolutions 65, 73, 186
epistemology 18 Freud, Sigmund 13, 190
Escobar, Arturo 14, 51 Friedman, Thomas 24
espionage 32
ethnicity 65, 75, 134–35, 141–43, G8 53, 186
151, 175; see also race Gaia 58
euro 46, 72 Gandhi, Mahatma 66–67
European Central Bank 46 gap years 153–54
European Union (EU) 35, 46, 60, gay districts see homosexuality
71–72, 88, 146, 148 gender 11, 17, 85, 139, 147, 162,
164–65, 167, 169, 171–72, 181;
Facebook 53, 141, 181 see also feminist geography;
fair trade 114 patriarchy
famine 130, 146 General Motors 37, 96–97, 106
farmers’ markets 183 Geneva Convention 147
fascism 30, 185; see also Nazi genocide 187; see also Holocaust
Germany gentrification 118, 186
feminist geography 14, 17, 85–86, geo-economics 36, 40; see also
160–61, 164, 168, 171–72; see also transnational corporations
gender; patriarchy (TNCs)
feudal system 26 geography 1–2, 4–6, 24, 30, 35, 66,
Fiat 97 91–92, 178
films 33, 42–43, 75, 79; see also geopolitics 29–33, 47; critical
popular culture geopolitics 32–33
finance 44–47, 186; global finance Germany 3, 36–37, 71, 94, 106,
42–44; see also debt 110, 120, 140, 149, 184, 186;
financial crisis (2007–9) 35, 41, 43, Baden-Württemberg 97, 184;
45–46, 72, 97, 106 German Ruhr 93, 97, 186; Nazi
Finland 71 Germany 8, 30–31, 77, 187
‘First World’ 28, 49, 51; see also ghettoization 175
global North Gibson-Graham, J. K. 171–72
First World War 8, 72 Giddens, Anthony 13
flexibilization 116, 186 Gilroy, Paul 142–43
Florida, Richard 112 global city networks 118–21
food chains 113–14, 183 Global City, The 119–20
 INDEX 203
global corporations see transnational Guattari, Félix 13
corporations (TNCs) guerrilla resistance 52, 187
global North 37, 42, 45, 51, 53, 59, Gulf War 73, 124, 139, 187
82, 88, 96–97, 105–7, 114–18, Gutenberg Galaxy, The 186
121–22, 139–40, 144, 172, 175,
186; and population density Halifax 46
128–30, 135, 137 Harvey, David 9, 13, 27, 45
global output 39, 191 Haushofer, Karl 30
global production networks (GPNs) Hay Wain, The 85
40–41, 47, 106 Heartland thesis 30, 184, 189
global South 12, 42, 50–53, 87–88, hedonism 163, 187
95, 105, 114–15, 118, 150, 176, Heidegger, Martin 13
179–80, 186, 191; and population heteronormativity 172
density 129–30; and tourism hinterlands 87–88
153–54; see also developing HIV/AIDS 135–36
economies Holocaust 31, 187
global value chain 41, 186 homogeneity 29, 79, 187
global village 23, 186 homosexuality 140, 172–73; see also
global warming see climate change queer geography
globalization 2, 4–5, 16, 18, 22–25, Hong Kong 44, 78, 118, 156
74, 79, 88–89, 92, 95, 103, Hoskins, W. G. 84
113–14, 116, 118–20, 147, hotel chains 37, 77
149–51, 153, 171–72, 180, 186; housing 44, 186
anti-globalization movement 39, Hubbard, Phil 173–74
52–54; of business services human well-being 188; see also
110–11; and development 49–52, quality of life
54; and environmental issues 60; humanism 10, 187
global production networks Hurricane Katrina 57, 175
40–41, 47, 106; global society hybridity 68, 187
28–29; global trade 41–42; of
work 156–58; see also identity 19, 33, 62, 76–77, 85, 143,
transnational corporations (TNCs) 151, 163, 167, 169–70, 179–81;
governance 33–35, 41, 60; corporate of children 175–76; class 11, 17,
governance 35, 184 123, 151, 157, 169, 171; gender
government bonds 43–44, 184 see gender; multiple identities 20;
Great Britain see UK other 19–20, 76, 162, 169–71;
Great Powers 184 race see race; self 19, 76, 162–63,
Great Transformation, The 102 170–71; sexuality 140, 169,
Greece 1, 46, 63, 71 171–74, 181
greenhouse gases 35, 60, 187; Kyoto Ilbery, Brian 113
Protocol 35, 59, 188; see also imaginative geographies 76–77
climate change Imagined Communities 65
Greenpeace 29 immigration 137, 144–47; asylum
Gregory, Derek 14 146–50
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 49, imperialism 8, 76, 86, 191
108, 121, 187 India 41, 66–68, 73, 88, 95, 180
204 INDEX

Indian National Congress (INC) 66 Kapital, Das 26

Indonesia 39, 147 Kentucky Fried Chicken 113
industrial development; agriculture Kenya 156
and food 112–15; creative Keynes, John Maynard 13
industries 111–12; knowledge kings see monarchs
economy 108–11; manufacturing Kjellén, Rudolf 29
industries 105–8; service industries Klein, Naomi 53–54
108–11 Kondratieff, Nikolai 13, 93–94
Industrial Revolution 92–93, 128, Kondratieff waves 93–94, 96, 107,
187 121
industrialization 3, 13, 93–95, Korean War 31, 188
97–98, 121, 129–31, 188; see also Kristeva, Julia 14
deindustrialization Krugman, Paul 13
inequality 9, 42, 65, 154–55, 181 Kuwait 187
information and communication Kyoto Protocol 35, 59, 188
technologies (ICT) 43, 99, 103,
109, 120, 156, 181 labour 3, 10, 26, 186, 190
informationalization 100, 116, 187 labour geographies 154–58
innovation 92, 99–103, 179 land uses 88, 116–17
Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of landscape 19, 83–86, 91, 168, 171;
the Wealth of Nations, An 24–25 rural and rurality 87–89
International Criminal Court 35, language 33, 65, 75, 189
187 Laos 191
International Encyclopaedia of Human Latin American debt crisis 52
Geography 5 Latour, Bruno 13
International Monetary Fund 46, Law, John 13
50, 68, 188 learning region 103–5
internet 22, 43, 52–53, 94, 101, lebensraum 30–31, 77
103, 168 Lefebvre, Henri 14
iPods 22, 77 Lehman Brothers 46
IRA 74, 188 Lewis, Michael 165
Iran 64, 73, 149 Ley, David 14
Iraq 64, 149; see also Gulf War Leyshon, Andrew 13
Ireland 46, 67, 71–72 Liar’s Poker 165
Irish Republican Army see IRA Libya 139
Israel 142 life expectancy 49, 136
Italy 46, 63, 70–71, 93, 100, 148, ‘living space’ 30–31, 77
186 living standards 44, 188; see also
quality of life
Japan 28, 44, 88, 93, 95, 106–7, loans 43–44
114, 120, 137, 145, 164, 170, local buzz 104, 112
186–87, 189 Locke, John 2
JetBlue 101 Lonely Planet 81
Jewish diaspora 141–42 Lovelock, James 58
Jubilee Debt Campaign 42, 53 Lowe, M. 124
Justice and Equality Movement 149 Luxembourg 71
 INDEX 205
Mackinder, Halford 8, 30, 33, 184, nation-states 18, 25, 30, 33–34, 36,
189; see also Heartland thesis 39, 41–42, 45, 48, 52, 62, 64–67,
Making of the English Landscape, The 84 72, 75, 85, 119–20, 123, 127,
Malta 71 145, 148, 151, 188; citizenship
manufacturing industries 92, 96, 124, 138–41; see also states
105–8, 121; Fordist NATO 139
manufacturing 107, 116–17 Nazi Germany 8, 30–31, 77, 187
marriage 140 neoclassical economics 13, 25, 185,
Marshall, Alfred 13, 98, 104 189–90
Martin, Ron 13 neoliberalism 50, 52–53, 88, 180
Marx, Karl 13–14, 25, 183–84, 190; Nestlé 35
theory of capitalism 26–27 Netherlands 71, 93, 137, 140
Marxism 9, 11, 16–17, 19, 27, 123, new economy 111–12
189–91; and development 49–50, new social movements 54, 188
52 new world order 72–73
Massey, Doreen 14 New Zealand 89
Maye, Damian 113 newspapers 35
McDonald’s 22, 77, 113 Nicaragua 52
McDowell, Linda 14, 165 Nike 78
McLuhan, Marshall 186 No Logo 39, 53–54
men see gender; patriarchy Nokia 101
metaphysics 189 non-governmental organizations
Mexico 45, 52, 88, 135 (NGOs) 29, 155
Microsoft 35 non-representational theories 11,
Middle Ages 23, 63 188–89
Midnight’s Children 67 North American Free Trade
migration 29, 134–35, 137, 143–47; Agreement (NAFTA) 71
asylum 146–50 North Korea 24, 32, 73, 188
mobile phones 101 Northern Rock 46
mobility 89, 143–44, 150, 158 nuclear weapons 31–32, 73, 188
modernity 63, 77, 188
modernization 49–52, 58 Olympic Games 122
monarchs 26, 64–65 Opel 37
monopolies 69 Organisation for Economic
mortgages 43–44, 46 Co-operation and Development
Motown 96 (OECD) 148, 189
multinational corporations (MNCs) Orient 76, 189
36–37; see also transnational other 19–20, 76, 162, 169–71
corporations Ottoman Empire 64
multiple identities 20 O’Tuathail, Gerard 14
mutually-assured destruction (MAD) outer rim 30, 189
31, 188; see also Cold War overproduction 96
MySpace 141 Oxfam 29, 42

national debt see sovereign debt Pakistan 67, 73

nationalism 5, 62–69, 84–85 Palin, Michael 2
206 INDEX

passports 69, 138, 151 quality of life 158, 188; see also living
path dependency 97 standards
patriarchy 17, 189; see also feminist queens see monarchs
geography queer geography 7, 14; see also
Peace Corps 154 homosexuality
performativity 166–67, 179
Persian Gulf War see Gulf War race 11, 31, 162, 169–71, 174–75,
Peru 52, 153 181, 185; see also ethnicity
phenomenology 86, 189 Ratzel, Friedrich 8, 30
pivot areas 30, 189 recession 27, 45, 97; see also financial
Poland 8 crisis (2007–9)
Polanyi, Karl 13, 102 red light districts 173–74
political economy 9, 11, 13, refugees 146–50
189 regeneration 82–83, 121–23
political geography 3, 5, 7, 19–20, regional trade agreements (RTAs)
25, 28–29, 35, 39, 67, 69; see also 70–71
geopolitics regions 17, 91–92, 127, 180;
pollution 87, 181 agglomeration and clusters
popular culture 33, 63, 75 98–100; deindustrialization
population density 87–88, 127–32; 95–98; industrialization 93–95;
population crises 132–37 knowledge and innovation
Porter, Michael 13, 99–100 100–103; learning region 103–5
Portugal 46, 71–72, 95 Reign of Terror 73
positionality 19, 190 religion 64, 66–68, 75, 134, 141–42,
positivism 9–11, 189 163, 173, 189
postcolonialism 12, 20, 68, retail 37–39, 53–54, 78; see also
189 supermarkets
post-development 50–52 Rhine 3, 186
postmodernism 10–11, 17–18, 32, Ricardo, David 13
51, 76, 84, 189 Rio Earth Summit 59
poststructuralism 10–11, 32, 51, 84, rogue states 73
189 Roman Empire 23, 27, 63
Potter, Rob 14 Romania 71
poverty 2, 49, 51, 96 Romeo and Juliet 63
power 17–18, 33, 50, 56, 69–70, 76, Royal Bank of Scotland 46
78–79, 85, 165, 180 Royal Geographical Society 2, 6
practices 165–66, 179; emotions rurality 86–89
and affect 167–69; Rushdie, Salman 67
performance and Russia 32, 64, 67, 95, 186; see also
performativity 166–67 USSR
productivity 99, 190
profits 27, 54, 190 Said, Edward 14, 76, 143
prostitution 173–74 sanctions 191
pull factors 145–46 Sassen, Saskia 14, 119–20
push factors 145–46, 148; see also Sauer, Carl 83–84
asylum Sayer, Andrew 13
 INDEX 207
Scott, Allen 13 standards of living 44, 188
‘Second World’ 28, 49, 51; see also states 62–65, 69–72; see also
communism nation-states
Second World War see World steel industry 3, 37, 39
War II stereotypes 175
security 30, 32, 72–74 Storper, Michael 13, 104
segregation 175 structuration theory 13
self 19, 76, 162–63, 170–71 subjectivity 19, 33, 149, 167, 181,
Sen, Amartya 14 185, 190–91
sense of identity 185 suburbanization 117
service industries 108–11, 121 Sudan 149–50
sexuality 169, 171–74, 181; Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) 149
homosexuality 140, 172–73 supermarkets 38–39, 75, 114, 157,
Shakespeare, William 63–64 183
Shaw, Ian 169 superpowers 31–32, 72–73, 180
shopping malls 78, 80–81, 144 surplus value 27, 54, 190
shrinking world 23 sustainability 2, 14, 57–59, 124, 130,
Sibley, D. 175 180–81
Silicon Valley 94–95, 99–100, 190 sweatshop conditions 39, 53–54
Singapore 37, 147 Sweden 71
single currency 46, 72
Skype 156 tacit knowledge 101, 103–4
slave trade 142–43 taxes 39, 70
Smith, Adam 13, 24–26 Taylor, Peter 14
Smith, Neil 13 technology 93–94, 97, 101, 103,
social justice 9 181
social life 11, 27, 75, 183 television 23, 33, 35
social norms 40, 68 terrorism 72–74; war on terror 74;
social status 77 see also security
Société Géographie de Paris (SGP) 6 Tesco 38–39, 114
socioeconomics 102, 190 Thailand 81, 88
software 37, 42 theme parks 80
Soja, Edward 9, 13 Third Reich see Nazi Germany
Sony 156 ‘Third World’ 28, 49, 51; see also
South Korea 3, 188 global South
sovereign debt 45, 190 Thompson, Warren 131
sovereignty 64 Thrift, Nigel 13
Soviet Union see USSR Tibet 67
Spaceship Earth 23, 190 time-space convergence/
Spain 46, 67, 71–72, 83, 95 compression 16, 23, 191
spatiality 3, 16, 34, 41, 49, 91, 190; Titanic 145
of bodies 160–65; of total global output 39, 191
consumption 79–83 totalitarian governments 139
species extinction 185 tourism 81–83, 87, 89, 144–45,
spin-off firms 99, 190 151–54, 169, 173; ecotourism
sports metaphors 33 152–54, 185
208 INDEX

towns 87–88, 92, 118, 150; see also 31–32, 124, 191; see also Cold
cities War; Gulf War
trade justice 42, 191 USSR 28, 59, 68, 72; see also Cold
trade unions 154 War; Russia
transnational corporations (TNCs)
18, 34–40, 42, 53–54, 58, 70, 88, Valentine, Gill 14, 172
103, 106, 113–14, 118, 120, 150, values 54, 67–68, 79, 83–84, 102,
158, 172, 183; corporate 124, 151–52, 161, 167, 180–81,
governance 35, 184; see also 187, 190
individual corporations varieties of capitalism 70
transnationalism 150–51, 157 Vauxhall 37
travel see mobility; tourism Veblen, Thorstein 13
Treaty of Rome 71 Venables, Anthony 104
Truman, Harry S 48, 51 video games see computer games
Tuan, Yi Fu 14 video-conferencing 156
Turkey 64, 71 Vietnam 39
Twitter 53, 181–82 Vietnam War 31–32, 124, 191
visas 146
UK 3, 30, 37, 39, 44, 46, 66, 68, Volkswagen 106
70–71, 78, 80, 82–86, 92–94, voluntourism 153–54
96–97, 100, 104, 106, 108,
110–11, 118–20, 122–23, 135, Wall Street 43
137, 140, 145, 148–49, 156, 165, Wallerstein, Immanuel 14, 27
173–74, 186–87; see also British Walmart 38–39, 114
Empire war crimes 187
underdevelopment 48–49, 191 Warf, Barney 169
unemployment 96–97, 106, 175 wars 30, 67, 139, 145–46, 148–50,
United Nations (UN) 25, 34–35, 168; civil wars 32, 52, 139, 146,
58–59, 139, 148–49, 187–88; 149–50; Cold War 31–33, 72–73,
Brundtland Commission 57–59; 184, 191; Gulf War 73, 124, 139,
UN Security Council 73, 191; 187; Korean War 31, 188;
UNHCR 148 Vietnam War 31–32, 124, 191;
universities 1, 8, 83, 99, 102 war on terror 74; World War I 8,
Up in the Air 158 72; World War II see World War II
urban politics 123–25 Watts, Michael 14
urban regeneration 82–83, 121–23 weapons of mass destruction 188; see
urban systems 118–21 also nuclear weapons
urbanization 88, 115–18, 123 Weber, Max 13, 25, 184
US 33, 36, 44, 72–73, 78–80, 82, well-being 188; see also quality of life
86, 89, 92–97, 99, 101, 106–8, Western imperialism 8, 76, 86, 191
110, 116–20, 122, 135, 140, Whatmore, Sarah 13
144–48, 153, 163–64, 184, 186, ‘whiteness’ 175; see also ethnicity; race
189; 9/11 attacks 74; Detroit 39, Wolfe, Tom 165
96–98; Hurricane Katrina 57, women see feminist geography; gender
175; Silicon Valley 94–95, work 155–58, 176
99–100, 190; Vietnam War World Bank 50, 58, 128, 191
 INDEX 209
world system 25–28, 49 Yeung, Henry 13
World War I 8, 72 Young, Iris Marion 14
World War II 8, 23, 31, 48, 72, 94, Yugoslavia 67, 139, 149
105, 107, 109, 118, 122, 129,
139–40, 187; see also Nazi Zapatista movement 52,
Germany 88
Wylie, J. 86 Zimbabwe 136