The Dictionary of Human Geography (125 page)

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metropolitan area
A general term for large urban settlements. Metropolitan districts were first defined by the US Bureau of the census in 1910, by grouping together large central cities (i.e. administrative districts) with their contiguous suburbs into a single built up area to be used for reporting data. Over time, with continued urbanization and urban sprawl, definitions changed and there is now a hier archy of areas: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) groups of counties (or similar administra tive units) with total populations exceeding 100,000, comprising a central city (with (NEW PARAGRAPH) + residents) and surrounding sub urbs; (NEW PARAGRAPH) Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (CMSAs) larger units with populations exceeding 1,000,000; and (NEW PARAGRAPH) Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas (PMSAs) separate components within CMSAs: the Detroit/Ann Arbor CMSA comprises the separate Detroit and Ann Arbor PMSAs, and the New York/New Jersey/Long Island CMSA contains ten separate PMSAs. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Analysts have also defined Metropolitan Labor Areas, which extend beyond the built up areas to incorporate places from which at least 5 per cent of the workforce commutes to a metropolitan area. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Similar schemes (with terminological vari ations) have been defined by the census authorities to represent and report data for the urbanized areas in a large number of other countries. Rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) See http://www.census.gov/population/www/ estimates/metrodef.html. (NEW PARAGRAPH)
micropolis
A term introduced by Thomas (1989) and adopted by the US Bureau of the census in 2003, referring to urban agglomer ations with total populations between 10,000 and 49,999. Each micropolis comprises a number of separate but socially and econom ically integrated settlements (as measured by commuting patterns), one of which (the ?core centre?) has a population of at least 10,000; for example, the separate settlements of Lebanon (CT), Hanover and Enfield (NH) and Norwich and Hartford (VT) in the Upper Con necticut Valley comprise a micropolis based on Hartford. Using 2001 census data, 578 separate micropoli were identified, containing about 10 per cent of the total US population. (See also metropolitan area.) Rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Heubusch (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
microsimulation
Microsimulation operates at the ?micro? (not aggregate) scale, where the ?units? include the individual, household, firm or vehicles (International Microsimulation Association, www.microsimulation.org). These units and their socio economic trajectories are modelled by assigning them data attributes that are altered over (simulated) time by a set of rules governing the system in which they exist. Changes may be deterministic (they must hap pen, given certain characteristics) or stochastic (see stochastic process: there is a probability that they might happen). In this way the impacts of, for example, government policies and eco nomic decision MAklNG can be modelled. There are links between microsimulation and geocomputation, especially cellular autom (NEW PARAGRAPH) ATA and AGENT BASED MODELLING. RH (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ballas, Rossiter, Thomas, Clarke and Dorling (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Middle East, idea of
The term has its ori (NEW PARAGRAPH) gins in European and eventually American discouRSES of diplomacy, geopolitics and SECURlTy, and in a more diffuse cultural regis ter as imaginative GEOGRAPhlES of a largely Arab ?Orient?. The two cross cut in complex ways, but they have their origins in Napoleon?s military occupation of Egypt in 1798 (see occupation, MlLlTARy), in some measure part of a plan to cut Britain?s lines of commu nication with India, and the bloody campaigns that he fought through the Levant. In invading Egypt, Cole (2007, p. 247) argues, ?Bonaparte was inventing what we now call ??the modern Middle East?? ?, and ?the similarities of the Corsican general?s rhetoric and tactics to those of later North Atlantic incursions into the region tell us about the persistent patholo gies of ENLlGhTENMENT republics?. Said (2003 [1978]) locates the formation of a distinctly modern orientalism in the textual and visual appropriations of Egypt made for a European audience by the scientists, scholars and artists who accompanied the French troops. (NEW PARAGRAPH) French politicians and diplomats had described the Ottoman Empire as la Proche Orient (?the Near East?) from the end of the eighteenth century, and for most of the nine teenth century the ?Eastern Question? that concerned high politics in EUROPE was invari ably an Ottoman one. But in the course of the nineteenth century civil servants in Britain?s India Office started to describe what was then Persia and its surrounding regions as ?the Middle East?, and it was the geo strategic relation to Britain?s Empire in India that gave the term its eventual currency. In 1902 an American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840 1914), in what proved to be an extra ordinarily influential essay on ?The Persian Gulf and International Relations? (Mahan, 1902), argued that Britain?s control over its approaches to India via Suez and the Gulf (which is how he loosely defined ?the Middle East?) was threatened by Russian advances in Central Asia and by the proposed construction of a rail link between Berlin and Baghdad; not surprisingly, he championed the importance of sea power, and recommended that the Middle East would ?some day need its Malta as well as its Gibraltar?. The term was popularized by Valentine Chirol, who published a major series of articles in the Times, followed by a book under the title The Middle Eastern question, or some political problems of Indian defence (1903). The ?Middle East? was envisioned as a security belt running from Persia through Mesopotamia and Afghanistan to Kashmir, Nepal and Tibet: as Scheffler (2003, p. 265) notes, an abstract space whose common denominator was a strategic location across the northern and western approaches to India. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The region was redefined after the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the attempt by the Great Powers to divide most of the spoils between them, but it retained its strategic inflection and gained new geo economic significance as the import ance of oil came to be recognized (at first, as the basis for naval supremacy). The European powers drew new lines on the map to create new states. In 1921, Churchill created a Middle East Department in the Colonial Office, whose area of responsibility was Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan and Aden; and during the Second World War Britain established a Middle East Command, whose area ofrespon sibility spiralled out from Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Transjordan and the Arabian Peninsula to include Greece and Malta in the Mediter ranean and Egypt, the Sudan and swathes of East Africa. After the war, the region was plunged back into conflict by the partition of Palestine, the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the dispossession of hun dreds of thousands of Palestinians. By then, Britain?s star was fading a fact dramatically confirmed by the Suez Crisis of 1956 and growing American geopolitical and geo eco nomic interest in the region, partly in response to the expanding Soviet sphere of influence during the coLd war, was signalled by the US State Department?s focus on a Middle East that it now delimited as Egypt, Syria, Israel, Leba non, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bah rain and Qatar. This new regionalization was underwritten by financial support for area STUdlES and Centers for Middle Eastern Studies at major American universities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Europe and America continued to be exer cised by the region throughout the second half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty first, and its geopolitical construction as what Sidaway (1998) called an ?arc of crisis? spanned successive wars between Arab states and Israel, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank after 1967, the unresolved Palestinian question and the iNTlfAdA, chronic crises and civil wars in Lebanon, the Iraq Iran War (1980 8), the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War (1990 1). A key US response to these crises was the formation of a unified combatant command in 1983, US Central Command (CENTCOM), to cover ?the ??central?? area of the globe between the European and Pacific Commands? and which (in significant part) retraced the outlines of the former British Middle East Command. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Its importance was further increased by the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 and the US led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (see terrorism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) CENTCOM articulates a highly particular imaginative geography of the region (Morris sey, 2009), but the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were underwritten by, and also extended, a series of cultural formations that could be traced back through the long history of British and American interventions in the region to a deep seated Orientalism (Gregory, 2004b). In doing so, they confirmed that the ?Middle East? is a profoundly ethnocentric construction, as Bernard Lewis (1999) once had it, ?meaningless, colorless, shapeless, and for most of the world inaccurate?. This reached its nadir in portrayals such as this, from Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek soon after 9/11: ?This is the land of suicide bombers, flag burners and fiery mullahs.? In one astonishing sentence, the various, vibrant cultures of the region were fixed and frozen into one diabolical landscape (Gregory, 2004b, p. 60). And yet this (in)sensibility captured the accumulated rhetorical effect of con structions of the Middle East with dismal fi delity. For the ?Middle East? as a concept has been constructed, both geopolitically and dis cursively, largely from the ?outside?: and yet its problems and predicaments are almost always assigned solely to those on the ?inside?. As Mamdani (2002) put it, within the optic of a Euro American ethnocentrism, the world is divided into two, ?so that one part makes cul ture and the other is a prisoner of culture?. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Khalidi(1998);Lockman (2004); Scheffler (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
migrancy
The state or condition of being a migrant; ?migrancy? generally emphasizes the cultural, social and political constructions and experiences of migrant groups and displaced people (cf. migration). Historically, the slow and discontinuous process of sedentarizing populations and fixing political borders and boundaries was often accompanied by a sus picion of those who remained constantly on the move. Thus, for example, the figure of the merchant forever travelling to fairs and distant MARkETS occupied an ambiguous position within the territorializations of fEUDALlSM in much of medieval EUROPE, even though such movements provided essential functions for trans regional economies. mobility was often a privilege, to be sure, and it was threaded in to wider circuits of power and authority, so that it was (and remains) those who were homeless and forced to move (through dis ease or poverty, for example) who attracted the most suspicion and even hostility. Some social groups regarded migrancy as a cultural formation constitutive of their very identity: ?travelling peoples? such as the Roma (?Gypsies?), the tramping artisans of nine teenth century Britain (Southall, 1991) or the hobos of late nineteenth and early twen tieth century America (DePastino, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Even though globalization and modern ity are predicated on movement and depend on migration, these capacities are still subject to social discrimination. Under neo liberal globalization, the world may be ?flat? for busi ness travel and international tourism, but those who travel under other, no less legitim ate, signs are subject to policing, restriction and even detention: the Roma continue to encounter social exclusion (Sibley, 1998; Bancroft, 2005) and groups such as asylum seekers and REfUGEES, and guest workers in EUROPE, the Gulf, Asia and Canada, find their living conditions and civil rights circum scribed by their very migrancy. The suspicion of migrancy is shared by colonial and post colonial states alike, whose governments often view migrant populations as threats to their ordering design and apparatus of control. Pastoralists and shifting cultivators were (and continue to be) seen by states as lesser produ cers whose activities thwart efficiency, erode environments, and undercut the positive ex ternalities that putatively attach to private property and sedentary agriculture (see pas toralism). Lurking in these assessments is a sense that migrancy equates to vagabond con duct, an equation that is frequently sharpened through racialization: thus the Bedouin in Israel have been constructed by the Israeli government as inimical to the property and political regimes of the settler state and, through their supposedly aberrant spatiality, left literally ?out of place? and ?suspended in space? (Shamir, 1996; Mair, 2008). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In counterpoint to these bleak assessments, however, and the unilinear teleology of a singular Western modernity that sustains some of them, Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003) have emphasized that the suBjECT positions produced through migrancy cannot be axiomatically reduce to passivity or victim hood and that, in particular circumstances, these mobilities often marginalized in con ventional accounts may be vehicles for cul tural and political assertion. To recover the complex contours of MlGRANcy and the web of diasporic populations thus requires both critical analyses of the institutions that frame and facilitate, entrap and exclude migrants, but also careful and intrinsically spatialized ethnographies of the migrant condition. (NEW PARAGRAPH) DG/VG (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003); Mills (NEW PARAGRAPH) (1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
migration
The residential relocation of an individual, family or group from one place to another (see also MlGRANcy). It is distinct from tourism or other short term visits that do not involve a change in residence. Geographers have been particularly interested in migration, since it is so clearly related to both the development of places and the rela tionships between them (Skeldon, 1997; Black, 1998). According to the most recent figures, there are nearly 200 million migrants in the world, defined as people who are living outside their country of birth (Global Commission on International Migration, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Traditionally, migration is classified according to four broad criteria: intra national versus international; temporary versus per manent; forced versus voluntary; and legal versus illegal (Bailey, 2001; Castles and Miller, 2003). Within GEOGRAPHy and other social science disciplines, scholars tend to spe cialize according to these distinctions. For ex ample, the field of intra national migration (also known as MOBlLlTy) is generally distinct from that of international migration. Similarly, largely separate groups of researchers study forced migration, or the movement of refu gees and AsyLUM seekers, versus those who study migration arising from economic motiv ations. If nothing else, these categories reveal that migration is a complex phenomenon that can be generated by a number of processes. Just as there are many causes of migration, there are also many consequences. Recently, critical geographers and other progressive scholars have called these sharp distinctions into question, noting that most migrants take a variety of factors into account when making their decision to move (Bailey, 2001). While it may seem an obvious point, this is a crucial issue, since all of the systems that seek to regulate migration are based on the assump tion that the causes of each individual move ment are identifiable and discrete. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ernest George Ravenstein is acknowledged as the first person to theorize migration and he (NEW PARAGRAPH) introduced a number of ?laws? in the 1880s that he believed captured the most important processes involved (Grigg, 1977). For exa mple, he stated that: the tendency for migra tion varies inversely with the distance between source and destination (i.e. there are far more short distance moves than long distance ones); the majority of migrants move in order to improve their economic circumstances; therefore migration is mainly directed to places of concentrated economic opportunity, particularly cities; migration accelerates when movement becomes easier (e.g. once trans portation infrastructure is in place); women tend to move shorter distances than men; and migration in one direction eventually gener ates its opposite movement in the opposite direction. These early generalizations are still seen as relevant and form the basis of the most prominent model of migration. The GRAVlTy model uses a simple mathematical equation to predict the amount of migration between any two places, which is projected as the product of the population size of the two places divided by the distance, squared, between them. More elaborate versions of the gravity model take more factors into consideration and are cor respondingly more mathematically complex. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Migration theories today are dominated by three strands of thought. The first is a legacy of the Ravenstein approach, but informed by more recent economic theories. It posits that individuals migrate when it is in their eco nomic interest, and will go to the place that maximizes their life long earning potential. Meanwhile, governments create migration policies to attract the talents that they lack (cf. public POLlcy). The world is therefore seen as a kind of ?migration MARkET?, much like the labour market, with rational actors and predictable outcomes (Borjas, 1989). Individ uals with high levels of human capital (educa tion and work experience) go to places that provide the highest wages for that group. Meanwhile, less skilled individuals gravitate to countries with the least polarized wage rates and the most generous welfare policies. These types of migration are labelled, respect ively, ?positive' versus ?negative selection'. There is also an emerging new economic the ory of migration that considers families the basic unit of decision making rather than individuals. According to this theory, families seek to enhance their survival through minim izing risk (as opposed to atomized individuals seeking to maximize their earnings), and therefore attempt to place individual family members in several countries at the same time, providing multiple possibilities should life become difficult in any particular place (Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino and Taylor, 1993). Economic theories of migration, old and new, are often used to gen erate predictions of the scale and direction of migration. For this reason, they are considered to be highly relevant by governments that are interested in regulating migration. Critics charge that these models make invalid assumptions (e.g. that individuals are fully informed about opportunity structures in other countries), and produce highly simpli fied results. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The second major strand of migration the ory is based in the logic of woRLd sysTEMS ThEORy. According to this view, migration is generated by the expansion of the capitalist system throughout the world, which destabil izes traditional ways of life both econo mically and environmentally in an ever expanding periphery (Black, 1998). People move because their livelihoods are comprom ised, especially when they also become captiv ated by the lure of high wages and consumer capitalism in affluent countries. However, affluent countries create barriers to migration in an effort to preserve their privilege. They therefore allow the selective admission of highly skilled individuals (such as trained medical professionals or high tech engineers) and relatively small numbers of individuals who are deemed to be unskilled, who are expected to accept jobs that are shunned by domestic citizens (Castles and Miller, 2003). Typically, members of the first group are granted permanent residence, while those belonging to the latter are expected to return home when their labour is no longer required (e.g. the guestworker programs in Europe from the 1950s to the 1970s). In this sense, migration is a key ingredient in the develop ment of dual, or segmented, labour MARkETS, with migrants, who are typically racialized cul tural minorities, employed in ?3D? jobs (dirty, dangerous and difficult) and members of mainstream society in better remunerated jobs that are protected by professional associ ations or unions. Migration regulations are therefore implicated in a continuing process of dEVELOPMENT versus UNdERdEVELOPMENT, both across societies and within them (Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino and Taylor, 1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The third major body of theory emphasizes social aspects and is especially concerned with the relationship between social NETwoRkS and migration. Individuals make migration decisions in the context of imperfect infor mation that is shared across social networks, which often include people who have migrated (Tilly, 1990b; Weiner, 1995). Migrants tend to follow those who have gone before them, in a process that is called ChAlN migration. This is a rational process, since new migrants bene fit from the experiences of their predecessors. Newcomers are also assisted when they arrive in the destination country. As this process gains momentum, immigrant communities emerge and gradually build in group sociocul tural institutions. Frequently, these communi ties are geographically concentrated and may be seen by mainstream society as GhETTOS, places that are both isolated from mainstream society and also disadvantaged though there are important exceptions to this tendency (cf. UNdERCLASs). The network approach to migration has led to three particularly power ful insights. First, chain migration leads to a process of cumulative causation; that is, each move helps build pathways that facilitate add itional migration. Migration begets migration (Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino and Taylor, 1993). Gradually, people in the source society become convinced that migra tion is ?normal? and even expected as a rite of passage. Second, social networks become stretched between source and destination soci eties, with people who are closely connected on both sides. Echoing the point first made by Ravenstein, people begin to move back and forth across these networks in a process of cir cular migration. fREquENTLy, these moves are linked to significant LlfE cycLE turning points, such as entering tertiary education, looking for work, raising a family and retirement. Moreover, information flows quickly across these stretched social networks, as people communicate on a regular basis and economic links also intensify. People in these trans national networks develop new, combinator ial identities that include elements of both source and destination societies, and are con scious of political and social developments in both societies (Vertovec, 1993; Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004). Geographers have con tributed significantly to understanding these forms of transnational behaviour and identity. Finally, scholars who study migration net works highlight the significant differences between men and women in all aspects of migration, including: the reasons for migra tion; migration pathways; and the conse quences of migration for the individuals involved (Pessar, 1999; Silvey, 2006; Yeoh, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) All of these theories are much better equipped to understand voluntary migration, where people make choices about when to leave and where to go. Actually, the bulk of international migration is forced: people are compelled to leave their residence due to con fLlCT, persecution, environmental degrad ation, natural disasters or development projects (Black, 1998; Hyndman, 2000). Cer tain types of forced migration are monitored and, to a degree, regulated by international agencies, particularly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migra tion. These organizations assist migrants by helping build and service refugee camps, fa cilitating repatriation when circumstances in conflict zones improve, and arranging resettle ment in other countries in cases when conflict or persecution persists. In 2006, the UNHCR estimated that there were approximately 20 million ?persons of concern?, or refugees, worldwide. The UNHCR and other agencies attempt to ensure that the principles of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and the 1967 UN Protocol Re lating to the Status of Refugees are upheld. Note that other types of migration are mainly regulated by nation states rather than inter national agencies. That is, nation states gen erally have the right to decide who can enter their borders and on what terms (Castles and Miller, 2003). However, signatory states to the aforementioned UN Convention and Protocol are obligated to provide asylum to refugees. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Since the 1980s, researchers have sought to understand the ethical issues involved in migration. This sub field tends to concentrate on three major issues. First, is migration a human right? That is, should individuals have the right to live where they choose (based on an individual rights perspective; Carens, 1987), or should states have the right to control their membership by selective ad mission policies (based on a collective rights perspective; Weiner, 1996)? Second, who should realize the rewards of migration and, conversely, pay the costs associated with it: the migrant, the destination society, or the source society (Castles and Miller, 2003)? Generally speaking, governments of countries that receive migrants create admission policies that are intended to secure the benefits of mig ration for their societies, and pay little atten tion to migrants and virtually none to source countries. For example, affluent countries fre quently encourage highly trained medical per sonnel to immigrate without consideration for the difficulties involved for the migrants (in re establishing their credentials) or for the consequences for source countries (which are losing scarce individuals who have typically been trained in public education systems). Third, what should be expected of migrants once they join a new society? Should they be required to assimilate or be encouraged to retain their cultural traditions? Each of these questions has generated vigorous debate in the scholarly and policy oriented literatures. dh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Black (1998); Castles and Miller (2003); Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino and Taylor (1993); Weiner (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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