The Dictionary of Human Geography (162 page)

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public-private partnership (PPPs)
A collab orative project involving the state apparatus and private companies, with the latter involved in some aspects of the provision of public services. Such partnerships have been promoted as part of the neo LlbERALism agenda for two main reasons. Ideologically, private companies are presented as more effi cient at managing large projects than the pub lic sector (cf. privatization). Pragmatically, undertaking developments in this way can allow governments to avoid bearing the capital costs in their budgets thereby reducing the public sector borrowing requirement and, it is believed, interest rates and/or avoiding large increases in taxes to pay the upfront costs. (NEW PARAGRAPH) An example of such partnerships in the UK has been the Private Finance Initiative launched in the 1990s, whereby contractors undertake the capital works building a prison, hospital, school, or road, for example and then lease the facility to the government, which pays for the facility through its current rather than capital account. In some cases, the private contractor may either operate the new facility and pay part of the profit to the gov ernment (as with a toll road) or is given some role in its management (as with a place on a school?s governing body) this is known as the state ?contracting out? part of the provision of public services. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Examples of PPPs include New York?s Central Park, which is managed for the City?s Department of Parks and Recreation by the Central Park Conservancy, and an extension of California?s State Route 125 south of San Diego, which was built by a private company California Transportations Ventures Inc; the Lane Cove Tunnel under Sydney Harbour in Australia was constructed under a similar scheme, with the contractor then operating it on a 33 year lease. In the UK, the National Air Traffic Services (NATS), which control use of the country?s airspace, is part owned by the government (which has a 49 per cent stake), with most of the remainder held by a consor tium of companies involved in the airline busi ness: as with many such projects in the UK, the work of NATS is overseen by an independ ent regulator, which can control prices and the quality of service provision. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Whether the use of PPPs is either more efficient or more effective is open to doubt. Some claim that the overall cost of the lease back arrangements will be greater than the initial capital costs, so that PPPs in effect involve the taxpayer creating profits for the private sector, which may be enhanced by the private companies? employment practices: in response, others argue that without such part nerships many projects would not happen, because the public sector cannot bear their (NEW PARAGRAPH) cost without substantial increases in tax rates, which would deter other investment and entrepreneurship. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bovaird (2004); Walzer and Jacobs (1998); Wet tenhall (2003). See also http://www.hm treasury. gov.uk/documents/public private partnerships/ ppp index.cfm (NEW PARAGRAPH)
public services
Services that are provided by (or on behalf of) the state according to non market criteria; that is, on the basis of the need for the services rather than the ability to pay. Although the boundaries between what counts as a ?public? or a ?private? service have historically been subject to change, together with which sector has done the providing, in general services are provided collectively because provision through the market or the third sector is believed to be either inefficient, ineffective or inequitable. Studies inside and outside of geography have tended to focus on a number of areas of public service provision and utilization, such as education, hEALth care and housing (see housiNg studies: see also Walsh, 1995). In each case a particular type of collective consumption politics has been found to exist, over the provision of the public service and the conditions under which it is provided. Geographers have been particu larly sensitive, not surprisingly, to the geo graphical aspect of provision of services, related to wider concerns over spatial iNequaLities, territorial justice and wel fare geography (Smith and Lee, 2004). Three arguments have been made for the need for a geographically attuned analysis of distri bution of public services and the level of pro vision: first, that service provision varies by territory; second, that the benefits of a pub lic service decrease the further an individual is away from its provision (cf. distance decay); and, third, that the location of services matters to surrounding areas and neighbourhoods, in the form of externalities these are impacts that are not part of the initial decision mak iNg process, and can be either ?negative? or ?positive?, although in many cases externalities are both, how you regard them depends on your own position. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Underpinning much geographical work on public services is an attention to the restructur ing of the WELfare state (Pinch, 1997). Decisions made by the state apparatus, over the provision of public services, reflect wider economic and political processes. Geographical distribution is often the outcome of a range of (NEW PARAGRAPH) territorial influences. For example, politicking by local government, regional voluntary agencies, nation states and transnational corporations might produce a particular geo graphical configuration of public service provi sion. Current concern with the process of neo liberalism, and what this process means for the qualitative restructuring of the state apparatus, lies behind recent work on public service provi sion and consumption (Peck, 2001). As we wit ness a variety of provision arrangements emergingin different countries, between govern ments and private sector companies, so tensions over the defining and the use of terms such as ?equity? and ?efficiency? take on extra import ance. What is meant by a ?public service?? Who has access to it and at what cost? These are questions that currently unite those working on the geographies of public services and those working on issues of state restructuring, in dif ferent regions of the world and in different areas of policy. kwa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Peck (2001a); Pinch (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
public space
Space to which all citizens have a right of access. Public space must be juxta posed with private space, or space over which private property rules are in operation. Central to those rules is the right of owners to exclude others from the use and enjoyment of a space. Public space, conversely, is pre sumptively open to all. The archetypical pub lic space is the plaza, street or park, the ?traditional public forum' characterized by the US Supreme Court as those places that have immemorially been used for public assembly, debate and informed dissent. An array of ?semi public' spaces can also be iden tified, such as the airport or university. (NEW PARAGRAPH) To speak of public space is necessarily to speak of the public sphere, the realm of collect ive opinion and action that mediates between society and state. Most famously, Jurgen Habermas characterized the public sphere as the site of deliberative and rational communi cation, within which free, rational discourse can occur between citizens (Habermas, 1989 [1962]; see also citizenship), distanced from the particularities of the state, the economy and the private domain (see private a:nD pubLic spheres). While membership in the public has long been constrained by exclusions of gender, cLass and race, it still holds normative appeal. Signalling a site of inclusion and acceptance, outsiders have long struggled for membership in the public sphere. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While the public sphere and public space are not necessarily interchangeable publics can form in private space, as some feminist geographers (Staeheli, 1996: see also Feminist geographies) have noted with reference to the private home in general, it is in public space that the conversations and encounters of public life become physical and real. For Young (1990a, p. 240): ?[p]olitics, the critical activity of raising issues and deciding how institutional and social relations should be organized, crucially depends on the existence of space and forums to which everyone has access'. These spaces serve several valuable political ends. The occupation of public space, for Mitchell (2003a), is a crucial means by which the boundaries of the public can be remade. Street protests, for example, can make visible the socially invisible. The phys ical designation and design of public space itself can also become avenues for the negoti ation of politics (Low, 2000) and forms of public memory, as well as collective forgetting (Burk, 2003). The encounters with diFFer ence that occur in public space can also foster the formation of an inclusionary ethos, as we learn to accommodate those people and inter ests beyond our own familiar contacts and ways of life. (NEW PARAGRAPH) For one constituency, however, the very diversity and unpredictability of public space undercuts the value of publicness. The rising homeless population (see homeLessness), combined with a Law and order ethos, has prompted regulation targeted at ?disorder' in public space (such as panhandling). The exclusionary logic of such intervention has prompted some to posit the end of public space. Scholars have also traced the privatiza tion ofpublic space in the Western city, worry ing at its effects on political activity and social life (Kohn, 2004). nkb (NEW PARAGRAPH)
quadrat analysis
A method of point pat teen analysis widely used in ecology, particu larly in the analysis of plant distributions and adopted for geographical use. A rectangular mesh is laid across an area and the distribution of points in each rectangle counted. That distri bution can be modelled using a variety of procedures to assess whether it: conforms to what would occur under a random allocation process; is significantly clustered in some portion of the space; or is more regular than random. centeal place theoey, for example, predicts that the distribution of settlements in a rural area would fall into the third of those categories, whereas theories of agglomeeation suggest that industrial plants should be signifi cantly clustered. (cf. categoeical data analy sis; poisson eegeession). Quadrat analysis can generate local statistics, but artificial bound aries imposed around the study region at the limits of each quadrat affect their utility: a more sophisticated approach, taking a more continu ous definition of space, is geogeaphically weighted eegeession. ej (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Getis and Boots (1978); O?Sullivan and Unwin (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
quadtree
A procedure for compressing the file size of geographical data sets that works by splitting a study region into four quadrants as with the division of a rectangular area into four smaller rectangles and then recursively splitting the quadrats until each is homoge neous on defined variables of interest that it contains. Quadtrees are also used in geo geaphic infoemation systems to index phenomena within an area such as points, lines and areas according to their spatial location. The approach assumes spatial auto coeeelation in data sets and allows them especially those in a eastee format to be efficiently sorted, explored and disseminated (e.g. over the Internet). ej (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wise (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
qualitative methods
Guidelines to frame research questions, assess what counts as authoritative evidence and knowledge, and collect interpretable data, and distinguished from quantitative methods. The discipline of geogeaphy has a long tradition of qualita tive methods, and it has been argued that the prioritizing of quantitative methods, associ ated with the quantitative eevolution of the 1950s and 1960s, was an aberration within the discipline?s history (Winchester, 2000). Explicit calls for qualitative methods came in the late 1970s from humanistic geogeaph ees, in reaction to what was perceived as the economic determinism, one dimensionality and objectification of social life within spatial science (Ley and Samuels, 1978). There were (at least) two methodological strands to hu manistic geogeaphy: an historical and hee meneutic understanding of the production and meaning of landscape, and another within social geogeaphy that drew upon phenomenology and symbolic inteeaction ism, and sought to understand social worlds from insiders? perspectives, often through pae ticipant obseevation or ethnogeaphy (Limb and Dwyer, 2001). Through the 1980s, feminist geogeaphies took up and expanded humanist geographers? concerns to acknowledge and examine the values, politics and ethics underlying all social research, and the need to understand and document the plurality of coexisting and divergent social worlds in all of their affective intensity and complexity. Feminists have been particularly concerned to think through implications of the positionality of the researcher and re searched, the workings of powee within the research process and the responsibility of using research to create social change. The influence of post colonialism and post steuctuealism has furthered these preoccu pations. Qualitative methods are now common and seen as appropriate in all sub disciplines of geography, including economic geogeaphy, migeation studies, political geogeaphy and health geogeaphy. (NEW PARAGRAPH) By the 1990s ?a frightening array of philo sophical, conceptual and theoretical terms [were] embedded in the qualitative research literature?, and neat links between philosophy, theory and method were being ?unpicked? (Smith, S.J., 2001, pp. 23 4). Nonetheless, (NEW PARAGRAPH) qualitative approaches tend to share some common understandings about ontoLogy and episTemoLogy: social worlds are dynamic and not fully stable or predictable; social life is pro duced through human (and non human) agency; there are multiple social worlds, with distinctive and sometimes competing social meanings, competencies and practices; it is important to understand social life as it is ex perienced; knowledge is situated and partial (see situated knowledge); theory is to be developed through empirical research rather than tested empirically; the subjectivity of the researcher and researched is a factor in every stage of the research process; the production of knowledge is an inter subjective, relational pro cess between researcher and researched; and the researcher has ethical and social responsibilities to the researched (Limb and Dwyer, 2001). Smith argues that the choice of qualitative methods goes beyond these issues of ontology and epistemology, and is fundamen tally a political decision: ?We choose these methods . . . as a way of challenging the way the world is structured, the way that knowledges are made, from the top down . . . We are . . . adopting a strategy that aims to place non dominant, neglected knowledges at the heart of the research agenda?? (2001, p. 25; original em phasis). One part of this strategy involves mak ing space for these other knowledges by demonstrating the constructed nature of dominant ones. Within science studies, for instance, ethnographies of the production of scientific facts trace a myriad of small transla tions from ?the field' to the Laboratory (e.g. Latour, 1999a: see also fieldwork). Crit ical GIS makes explicit the genealogy and limi tations of the data on which GIS maps are based. Another strand of this strategy involves subjecting dominant institutions to ethno graphic study to show them to be more impro vised and less powerful than supposed; Mountz?s (2003) ethnography of the Canadian state is one example. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The debates about power, positionality, re flexivny and ethics are complex, and what has been called a crisis of representation began in the mid 1980s. Crang (2003) notes that such debates have progressed beyond the simplistic dichotomies between ?insiders' and ?outsiders' typical of earlier discussions to more nuanced considerations of?betweenness? or working ?alongside? research participants. Concerns nonetheless linger that qualitative researchers like all researchers unwittingly rely upon class, colonial and/or racial privil ege to gain access to informants and other information, and to produce knowledge that benefits mainly themselves. For instance, Chari characterizes ethnography as ?a process of alienation, through which, for instance, eth nographers poach on working class narratives for very different ends: like getting a job or tenure? (2003, p. 171). Such criticisms have provoked qualitative researchers to rethink their research encounters, to experiment with new ways ofproducing and judging knowledge and truth, and to consider a broader range of knowledges as useful and relevant. Reflecting upon their work in Pakistan, Butz and Besio (NEW PARAGRAPH) consider the concept of autoethnogra phy as one means of repositioning research subjects as active transculturally knowing sub jects rather than ?native informants?. Autoeth nography attends to the ways in which research subjects actively produce and repre sent themselves within the terms of dominant discourse, and complicates the boundary be tween authentic truth and manipulated (and manipulative) self presentation or perform ance. Butz and Besio describe how they have organized their research to support their research participants' own projects of self representation, thereby ?multiplying the com municative resources available to them' (Smith, S.J., 2001b, p. 27). Nagar has entered into another kind of collaborative research en deavour with eight development workers in Uttar Pradesh, India. Calling themselves the Sangtin Writers Collective, they have co authored a book in which seven grassroots workers write intimately and autobiographi cally about their lives. This book, first pub lished in India in Hindi in 2004, and more recently in the United States in English (NEW PARAGRAPH) , has created controversy in India be cause of its detailed critique of the politics of the non governmental organization for which these women worked, and has become a cata lyst for organizing among other grassroots workers. There are now many examples of collaborations in participatory action re search (Pain, 2004), which tends to be differ ent from, and indeed can be at odds with, the goals of applied geography (the latter is often more closely aligned with the priorities and perspectives of the state). More broadly, Smith argues that ?Qualitative research is a mode of interference. If this interference is ??wrong'', such approaches should be discon tinued; they must be unethical. If it is ??right??, a lot more documentation and debate are needed on where this interference is going, whose interest it advances, what form it takes and why it is important? (2001, p. 27). (NEW PARAGRAPH) There are many different qualitative methods, and typologies for classifying them. Winchester (2000), for instance, identifies three categories of qualitative methods: oral (e.g. unstructured interviews and iNTerview ing, focus groups, and life histories), textual analysis (see text and textuaLity) and partici pant observation (or ethnography). Despite the diversity of qualitative methods used by geog raphers, Crang (2002, p. 650) notes a surpris ing tendency to favour interviews over ethnography surprising because ethnography would seem to be more in line with field based geographical traditions. Yet Herbert (2000) has calculated that only 3 5 per cent of journal articles draw on ethnographic research. The reasons for this are various, and include: diffi culties in gaining access (McDowell, 1998); challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork within existing institutional and funding time frames (Cook, 2001b) and disciplinary scepticism about the merits of ethnography (Herbert, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Two further methodological omissions have been noted. First, visual data tend to be under used, relative to oral testimony or text. Crang (2003, p. 500) reasons that qualitative researchers have been influenced by critiques of vision as a medium for a detached, mascu linist, objectifying gaze: ?If copresence is the privileged ground of qualitative truth claims, it is against a foil of ??bad?? vision? (see vision and visually). Especially given heightened concerns about the politics of representation, ?qualitative fieldwork almost turns away from the visual to avoid accusations of ??academic tourism?? and objectification? (p. 500). Rejec tion of the visual is, however, by no means complete, and non representationaL the ory and a focus on performance and the body have generated many intriguing experi ments with visual data and methodologies, some of which are reviewed by Crang. In her textbook on visual methods, Rose (2007 (NEW PARAGRAPH) ) provides an excellent overview of a wide range of visual data; questions that can be addressed through them; and a variety of strategies for analysing them. An over em phasis on discourse and representation grounds a second concern about the limita tions of geographers? use of qualitative methods: this is that too little attention has been directed to how people do things, as opposed to how they see the world or what they say about it. Smith argues that this has prompted a ?second crisis of representation? that focuses on the limits of representability (Smith, S.J., 2001, p. 28), and the importance of knowing through practice and recording fully sensual, richly emotional, momentary practices of social lives. Although qualitative methods are now widely used throughout the discipline, Thrift (2000a, p. 244) notes that even ?cultural geography still draws on a re markably limited number of methodologies ethnography, focus groups, and the like which are nearly always cognitive in origin and effect?. Large claims have been made of the methodological implications of non rep resentational theory: it is ?suggestive of noth ing less than a drive towards a new methodological avant garde that will radically refigure what it is to do research? (Latham, (NEW PARAGRAPH) p. 2000). Writing in 2005, Lorimer notes that ?the creativity [promised by non representational theory] in research design and method still needs to be unshackled? (p. 89). Given the emphasis on knowledge through practice, there is renewed interest in symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and ethnomethodoLogy. As much as using rad ically different methods, it may be a matter of re examining the potential of existing ones; for instance, to excavate everyday practices in archival evidence, or to conduct, experience and record interviews as fully embodied con versational performances in which subtle shifts in affect, tone and bodily comportment are as significant as what is said. And an argument that social life exceeds discourse need not lead researchers away from discourse; as Nash (2000) has argued, even a practice such as dance one that drew a great deal of attention in early formulations of non representational styles of thinking is not excessive to discourse but, rather, is a complex amalgam of discourse and embodied knowledges. Language itselfhas multiple relations to action: Chari (2003) draws on linguistic anthropology to consider Lan guage as an indexical and not just referential practice, and to consider the multiple relations between language and action. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Given an enquiring attitude about what counts as useful knowledge and recent interest in performance and the ?doing? of social life, qualitative researchers are reassessing what counts as valuable research ?products?, includ ing relatively private and fleeting ones (Thrift, 2000). For instance, whilst conducting an eth nography in a village in Pakistan, a Muslim community in which women supposedly dis approved of being photographed, Besio (Besio and Butz, 2004) was asked by some of the resident women to photograph them privately in out of the way places. Besio reads these secretive photography sessions as expressions of resistance to masculinist community norms. Her research thus generated a practice of eesistance that could not be made public, at least at the research site. Pratt (2004, p. 193) has urged that we consider the re search process itself as an important research outcome: ?We might think of it as a space . . . from which to speak and perform the unspeak able ... The written traces, for example [aca demic] text, are but one outcome of a process that far exceeds them.? Writing and other forms of representation (such as video or pho tography) can be a significant part of the ac tual research process in qualitative research; representation is a means of doing the re search, of making creative connections and developing interpretations. Different ways of understanding can be communicated through different media (Berg and Mansvelt, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite the widespread use of qualitative data, some scepticism remains about the cred ibility of qualitative data. Baxter and Eyles (NEW PARAGRAPH) are concerned that qualitative geog raphers often have not been sufficiently trans parent about their methodology. There is a danger of ?mining? qualitative interviews for enticing quotes that selectively advance the researcher?s interpretation, and of presenting de contextualized snippets of conversation. There is also a risk of stereotyping respondents by reading across interview transcripts to iden tify common themes rather than studying the contradictions and complexity within individ ual interviews. There are many different strat egies for analysing qualitative data (there are 43, according to Crang, 2005). Crang (2005) distinguishes three broad approaches: devel oping grounded theory, analysing the formal structure of the text or transcript or image, or reading qualitative data as narrative. McDo well (1998) describes a process of repeatedly reading her transcript data, first for plot and then for representations of ?self? (also, for a strategy for analysing narrative genres, see Chari, 2003). One characteristic of the best qualitative research is the immense volume of data collected, and although there is no sub stitute for examining the data closely and repeatedly, a number of computer software packages are available to systematize tran script data and to assist in coding it (Peace, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although qualitative

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