The Dictionary of Human Geography (119 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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development of fixed wing aircraft, helicopters and artificial satellites, as well as customized cameras and electronic scanners used in remote sensing (Dahlberg, Luman and Vaupel, 1990). Also known as photomaps, image maps have become a valuable supplement to the conven tional topographic ?line map?, so called because features are inscribed by crisp sym bols rather than inferred from tonal contrast. Although a single aerial photograph is a per spective view, with distances distorted locally by variation in elevation, photogrammetry allows the compilation of topographic maps from overlapping aerial photographs as well as the efficient generation of distortion free, ?orthorectified? photomaps (as in Google Earth: www.earth.google.com). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Electronic technology has radically altered the appearance and usability of maps. Ani mated maps, first produced on film but now generated by software, treat time as a scalable entity and afford historical maps with two scales, for example, ?ten seconds represents one year? for time and ?one inch represents five miles? for distance (Harrower, 2004). Dynamic maps afford dramatic fly by render ings of terrain or statistical surfaces, while interactive topographic maps overcome conventional treatments of scale and general ization by letting viewers zoom in or out. Interactive maps that let users retrieve add itional information by clicking on or merely rolling over a symbol can remove the inherent uncertainty of categories on a choropleth map, or promote a fuller understanding of an un familiar country or a local hazardous waste site (see visualization). The internet not only expedites the delivery of geographic informa tion, such as timely radar weather maps, but also affords instant access to historic maps in public archives and free, advertiser supported route maps with supplementary verbal direc tions. Societal impacts are especially apparent in Web based deliberative mapping, which fosters negotiated solutions of planning or political issues by multiple authors (Wiegand, 2002), and in a ?cybercartography? that promises a wider exploitation of multi sensor formats, an unprecedented degree of integra tion and customized products, and inevi table challenges for designers, politicians and scholars (Taylor, 2003). (See also map reading.) mm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Brewer (2005); Dorling and Fairbairn (1997); MacEachren (1995); Monmonier (1993); Peterson (2003); Southworth and Southworth (1982). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
map projection
A geometric transformation of the spherical world on to a flat mamap projection Principal developable surfaces (above) generate distinctive projection grids (below) projection is readily understood as a two stage process that begins by shrinking the world to a hypothetical globe, which establishes the map?s stated scale. The second stage develops an azimuthal, a conic or a cylindrical projec tion by transferring meridians, parallels, coasts and boundaries on to, respectively, a plane, cone or cylinder. Each of these three develop able surfaces has a distinctive grid of meridians and parallels. Sometimes a third stage readjusts locations and shapes, as when the sinusoidal projection corrects for the enlarged poleward areas on a cylindrical projection by bending meridians inward towards a central meridian. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Because of unavoidable stretching, com pression or shearing, map scale generally varies from place to place across the projection as well as with direction at a point. On a cylindrical projection, for instance, scale in the north south direction might be constant while east west scale grows indefinitely large near the poles. In general, scale will equal the stated scale only at the point, line, or lines of contact between the globe and the developable surface. Moreover, distortion increases with distance from the tangent point or standard line, the location of which positions a zone of comparatively low distortion. Allowing the developable surface to penetrate the globe pro vides a ring of low distortion on an azimuthal projection and two zones of low distortion on a conic or cylindrical projection. A map author can tailor a projection to a specific country or region by carefully selecting the develop able surface and its orientation to the globe (Robinson and Snyder, 1991; Canters, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Many perspectives and orientations are pos sible. Although all projections distort most distances, an equidistant projection might preserve true distance from the Equator, one of the poles or some other point of interest. Similarly, an equivalent projection can pre serve the true relative areas of countries and continents, whereas a conformal projection, which preserves small shapes as well as angles around points, is especially useful on large scale maps of small areas. Unfortunately, equidistance, equivalence and conformality are mutually exclusive. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Because the mapped area of a country or region can be seen as signifying its importance, the well known Mercator projection, which significantly reduces the relative size of trop ical nations, has been attacked as biased and eurocentric, with the most strident objections emanating from proponents of the Gall Peters projection, an equal area map touted as ?fair to all peoples? despite severe north south stretching in the Tropics and comparatively reliable shapes and angles across western Europe and the northern USA (Monmonier, 2004b). Several other equal area projections offer a more balanced pattern of shape dis tortion, and numerous compromise projec tions attempt to balance distortions of area and angles. Map authors eager to focus on people, rather than land area, can map socio economic data on a cartogram, on which area represents population (Tobler, 1963). mm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Monmonier (2004b); Snyder (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
map reading
The process of extracting information from a map, which is fundamental cartographic practice (see CARTOGRAPHy). Textbooks on the reading and use of maps and globes were produced from the 1500s onwards, as a required part of a noble or gen teel education. After 1650, they became a mainstay of public discourse and, after 1800, of regularized primary education in centraliz ing European states. Exercises in map reading were integral to Heimatkunde, the initial stage of the formal curriculum in geography adopted in German primary schools after 1871 and subsequently emulated throughout western Europe and Japan. After 1900, the interpretation of larger scale topographical maps developed as a key skill for the study of landscapes within both academic geography and the military (cf. MlLlTARy GEOGRAPHy). Militaries have generated a variety of technical manuals, and military orientated tasks domin ated the curricula of introductory map reading courses in many US universities after the Second World war. The needs of the military also drove academic research in cartography and human GEOGRAPHy into the cognitive pro cesses of map reading to support the produc tion of maps that could be read easily and effectively, while behavioural GEOGRAPHy included research into the development of map reading skills among children and adults (and also their production of mental maps). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In all these circumstances, map reading has been understood as comprising four tasks, regardless of map scale: (NEW PARAGRAPH) the identification and location of particu lar places; (NEW PARAGRAPH) navigation, which entails route selection, position verification and anticipation of the future; (NEW PARAGRAPH) the identification of patterns, distributions and morphologies of spatial features; (NEW PARAGRAPH) the cartometric endeavours of taking measurements from maps, whether as simple as determining distances or areas or as complex as the statistical analysis of a map?s geometrical accuracy (Maling, 1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These tasks have all been applied to old as well as modern maps (see CARTOGRAPHy, HlSTORy Of). In terms of ONTOLOGy, such map reading practices sustain the modern ideology of cartography (see also cartographic reason). Their repeated performance within authorita tive state institutions has naturalized the expectation that maps are intended to be used only in such specific ways. (The automatic reaction to critical approaches to cartography is thus to appeal to the functional authority and so legitimation of the road map.) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Against this limited and only partially adequate perspective, recent critics have sought to read maps as cultural documents, to eluci date their cultural and social significance (Edwards, 2003). Two approaches are espe cially rewarding. Strongly influenced by art historical studies in lC0N0GRAPHy, Harley (2001b) construed maps to comprise two layers of meaning: an overt layer of factual data, dir ectly accessed through standard map reading techniques, and an obscured layer of cultural meaning to be elucidated through identification and consideration of a map?s conventional and iconological symbolism. Wood and Fels (in Wood, 1992, pp. 95 142) advanced a more sys tematic analysis of maps as semiotic systems in their reading of a common road map; their essay has deservedly become the paradigm of critical map interpretation. Even so, their analysis of the differential and structured deployment of signs was preliminary. That is, the desideratum of a comprehensive and rigorous methodology for reading maps as cultural documents remains to be completed. (See also culture.) mhe (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Edwards (2003); Wood (1992, esp. pp. 95 142). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
market
The market is indisputably an example of what Raymond Williams (1976) called a ?keyword?. It is as a consequence rather complex, its meanings have been unstable historically, and its use and deployment always ?inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss? (p. 15). Adam Smith famously noted that there was an intrin sic human propensity to truck, barter and exchange things in other words, to commod ify the world through active participation in markets (cf. economy). Yet one of the great paradoxes of contemporary economics is that most textbooks do little to dispel the notion that markets are magical or supernatural, reflecting the extraordinary (and sometimes utopian) powers of the hidden hand. None other than Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase noted that markets had a ?shadowy role? in economic theory at least until they attracted the attention of other Nobel Laureates such as George Akerloff and Joseph Stiglitz (see McMillan, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) How, then, is the term ?market? deployed? One meaning is resolutely empirical and geo graphical: it is a ?public place where a market is held?, where the latter is ?a meeting together of people for the purpose of trade by private purchase and sale? (Online Merriam Webster Dictionary). In this sense, of course, markets have a very deep history commodities exchanged through some medium (money) extending back millennia. Numismatic research suggests that while there were no for mal markets as such, proto monies facilitating exchange may date back 10,000 years; gold coins were certainly in circulation 2,500 years ago in Turkey, and the Sumerians had made use of silver bars as a money 2,000 years earl ier. Markets are also in the business of com modity circulation. Markets facilitate and promote generalized commodity circulation. The multiplication of markets the purchase and sale of virtually everything implies com modification and the expansion of the com modity frontier to every nook and cranny of the world we inhabit (Willams, 1983 [1976]). Even if some domain of our social world remains immune to the deadly conceits of the market, the extent to which the logic of the marketplace has insinuated our culture and social life is historically unprecedented: we do not as a matter of right or principle buy and sell children, and yet human organs, sperm and ova can and are part of brisk market exchanges. There can even be markets in abstractions and fictions in climatic risk, in future bundles of currencies, in derivatives. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Yet this dictionary definition is superficial, because it says little of what actually consti tutes and what are the conditions of possi bility of market transactions. Most economists influenced by transaction cost analysis, by the studies of economic norms, and by the institutionalism of some forms of neo classical economics (see Williamson, 1985) identify decision making autonomy and participation as key to market operations: buyers and sellers willing partici pate in the exchange and can veto any deal (McMillan, 2002). The purported ?freedom? of the market buyers and sellers controlling their own resources and not acting under (extra economic) compulsion turns on choices and preferences subject to certain con straints (on their resources and the ?rules? of the market). Several aspects of this definition are important. First, where an authority rela tionship shapes the transaction, it is not a market transaction (it is another sort of trans action: administered or forced or perhaps black market). Second, for the poor the degrees of freedom, participation and choice are very constrained. Bargaining power between buyer and seller is unequal, yet economists would see the right of veto as ?a kind of freedom?. Third, while competition is not a defining feature of the market (markets might be oligopolistic), there is a presumption that adds to autonomy (by virtue of there being alternatives). As a consequence of these attributes, a market transaction is typic ally defined as: (NEW PARAGRAPH) An exchange that is voluntary; each party can veto it, and (subject to the rules of the market place) each freely agrees to the terms. A market is a forum for carrying out such exchanges. (McMillan, 2002, p. 6) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Market transactions defined in this way are, of course, limited: markets are never wholly ubiquitous and there are realms in which the reach of the market is limited even in advanced capitalist states. Many of the trans actions within households, within firms and within governments are not market transac tions as defined conventionally. Yet these non market transactions take place within a universe of dominant market transactions and indeed are directly and indirectly shaped by the powerful logics of the operations of the market. It is also clear from the definition of market transaction that markets are always in a limited sense ?free?. They always have rules, more or less formal. They require patterns of trust and social convention. And, not least, they demand the role of government in defin ing property rights, and typically providing complex bodies of Law pertaining to contracts. All of this endorses the idea that there are many different forms of markets, that market transactions presuppose quantities and qual ities of information (often unevenly unavail able information asymmetries is the neo classical argot), and that market transactions may be wildly different in their costs to buyer and seller alike. (NEW PARAGRAPH) When Simmel (1978) noted that ExchANGE is one of the ?purest and most primitive of forms of human socialization?, he endorsed the idea that a market is a social construc tion. As Stanford economist John McMillan puts it: for markets to work they must be ?well built?: the field of market design, accordingly, refers to the analysis and pragmatics the purposeful building of institutions for trans acting market exchanges. As McMillan says: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Market design consists of the mechanisms that organize buying and selling; channels for the flow of information; state set laws and regulations that define property rights and sustain contracting; and the markets culture, its self regulating norms, codes and conventions governing behavior . . . A workable design keeps in check transaction costs . . . Transaction costs are many and varied. (2002, p. 9) (NEW PARAGRAPH) And yet even in acknowledging these proper ties, it is not unusual to hear the claim from economists that ?no one is in charge of the market? (McMillan, 2002, p. 7). And to this extent, as Vaclav Havel once put it, the market ?is the only natural economy?. This, of course, raises another meaning of market that is both ideological and political (see idEOLOGy). In addition to markets and market transactions, there is the idea of ?the market?, or ?the market system? or ?the free market?. It is an abstract notion abstracted from the actual inter actions and functionings of many different forms of market but one that arises in at a particular moment its modern founding charter is associated with Adam Smith?s The wealth of nations and it has a long and com plex history. Smith was fully aware of the fact that markets had their limits, that government provisions and public GOOdS were indispens able to the operations of markets, and that markets left to their own devices could in fact be destructive. And yet he retained the ideo logical notion that markets were natural rooted in human impulses to truck, barter an exchange. There is, of course, an alternative narrative. Even at the time of Smith?s writing, his world was awash with the operations of a distinctively moral economy that privileged use value above exchange value (Thompson, 1991) and of claims for a just price. Popular reactions in defence of an arena that was seen to be beyond the market the commons defined much of what passed as politics (Neeson, 1993). At the very least, then, the modern market was not so much natural as the product of struggle. And it is a struggle that is central to the operations of the market in the twenty first century. The global com mons represent a frontier of contemporary resistance to and shaping of the rules of the market (Saad Filho and Johnson, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The contested nature of markets in the details or their operations or as a utopian vision is central to any understanding of ECONOMy, liberalism and MOdERNiTy (NEW PARAGRAPH) (Harvey, 2005). Karl Polanyi?s The great transformation and Friedrich Hayek?s The road to serfdom were both published in 1944. Hayek, an Austrian economist trained at the feet of Ludwig von Mises, but forever associ ated with a largely non economic corpus produced at the London School of Economics and the universities of Chicago and Freiburg between 1940 and 1980, is widely recognized as one of the leading intellectual architects of the neo liberal counter revolution (see neo liberalism). Margaret Thatcher pronounced that ?this is what we believe? as she slammed a copy of Hayek?s The constitution of liberty on to the table at Number 10 Downing Street during a Tory Cabinet meeting. Hayek?s cri tique of socialism that it destroys morals, personal freedom and responsibility, impedes the production of wealth and sooner or later leads to totalitarianism is the ur text for market utopians. Collectivism was by defin ition a made rather than a grown order: it was, Hayek said, constructivist rather than evolu tionary, organized not spontaneous, a ?taxis? (a made order) rather than a ?cosmos? (a spontan eous order), an economy rather than a ?catal laxy?, coerced and concrete rather than free and abstract (see Gamble, 1996, pp. 31 2). Its fatal conceit was that socialism (and social democracy for that matter) admitted the ?reck less trespass of taxis onto the proper ground of cosmos? (Anderson, 2005b, p. 16). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The other half of Hayek?s project was a ro bust defence of Western civilization that is to say of liberty, science and the spontaneous orders that co evolved to form modern sociETy (?Great Society?, as he termed it). It was a buttressing of the liberal (unplanned) market order from which the preconditions of civiliza tion competition and experimentation had emerged. Hayek, like Weber, saw this world as an iron cage constituted by impersonality, a loss of community, individualism and personal responsibility. But unlike Weber, Hayek saw these structures, properly understood, as ex pressions of liberty. From the vantage point of the 1940s this (classical) liberal project was, as (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hayek saw it, under threat: what passed as liberalism was a travesty, a diluted and dis torted body of ideas corrupted by constructivist rationalism (as opposed to what he called ?evo lutionary rationalism?). The ground between liberalism and much of what passed as Keynes ianism or social democracy was, on the Haye kian account, catastrophically slight. What was required, as he made clear at the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, was a restoration, a purging of true liberalism (the removal of ?accretions?). There was to be no compromise with collectivism: the seized terri tory had to be regained. In his writing and his promotion of think tanks such as the Institute ofEconomic Affairs in Britain the brains trust for the likes of Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher Hayek aggressively launched a cold war of ideas. He was part of the quartet of European theorists (Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott were the others) whose ideas, while standing in a tense relationship to one another, have come to shape a large swath ofthe intellectual landscape ofthe early twenty first century (see Anderson, 2005b). Hayek was neither a simple conserva tive or libertarian, nor a voice for laissez faire (?false rationalism?, as he saw it). He identified himself with the individualist tradition of Hume, Smith, Burke and Menger, thereby pro viding a bridge that linked his short term allies (conservatives and libertarians) to classical lib erals in order to make common cause against collectivism (Gamble, 1996, p. 101). To roll back the incursions of taxis required a redesign of the state. A powerful chamber was to serve as guardian of the rule of law (striking all under 45 years off the voting roll), protecting the law of liberty from the logic of popular sovereignty. As Anderson (2005a, p. 17) notes, the correct Hayekian formula was ?demarchy without democracy?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian economic historian and socialist who believed that the nineteenth century liberal order had died, never to be revived. By 1940, ?every vestige? of the international liberal order had disap peared, the product of the necessary adoption of measures designed to hold off the ravages of the self regulating market (market despotism). It was the conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life that made some form of collectivism or planning inevitable (Polanyi, 1944). The liberal market order was, contra Hayek, not ?spontaneous? but a planned development, and its demise was the product of the market order itself. A market order could just as well produce the freedom to exploit as it could the freedom of association. The grave danger, in Polanyi?s view, was that liberal utopianism might return in the idea of freedom as nothing more than the advocacy of free enterprise, the notion that planning is nothing more than ?the denial of freedom? and that the justice and liberty offered by regulation or control becomes nothing more than ?a camouflage of slavery? (1944, p. 258). Liberalism in this account will always degenerate, ultimately compromised by an authoritarianism that will be invoked as a counterweight to the threat of mass democracy. Modern capitalism con tained the famous ?double movement?, in which markets were serially and coextensively disembedded from, and re embedded in, social institutions and relations what Polanyi called the ?discovery of society?. In particular, the possibility of a counter hegemony to the self regulating market could be found in resist ance to the commodification of the three ficti tious commodities (land, labour and money): such reactions represented the spontaneous defence of society (Burawoy, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The market and anti market mentalities of Hayek and Polanyi were both forged in the context of fASClSM, global economic depres sion, revolution and world war. To look back on the birth of The great transformation and The road to serfdom from the perch of 2008 is quite salutary: we see american empire (mili tary neo liberalism), a global ?war on terror? (see terrorism), the dominance of unfettered global finance capital, a worldwide Muslim resurgence, a phalanx of ?failed states? (other wise known as the failure of secular nationalist development) and a raft of so called anti globalization movements, and the rise of civic regulation. There has been,

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