The Dictionary of Human Geography (170 page)

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regime of accumulation
A historically dis tinctive and relatively durable form of accumuLation under capitaLism, based on complementary patterns of production and consumption, together with a supporting mode of regulation (an ensemble of organizational forms, networks, and institutions, rules, norms and patterns of conduct). Derived from French regulation theory, the concept of regimes of accumulation is most commonly associated with the analysis of fordism, the post Second World War form of growth in North America and Western Europe, based on mass produc tion/consumption and ?Keynesian welfarist? modes of regulation (see Boyer, 1990; Jessop and Sum, 2006). Debates continue about the shape of the successor (post 1970s) regime, generically labelled post fordism. jpe (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Tickell and Peck (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
regime theory
An approach to politics that illustrates how different organizations interact in a dynamic power relationship under the umbrella of a larger project. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term has become influential in urban poLiticaL economy in the emphasis upon the management of interests shared between the private and pubLic spheres that coalesce into the government of an urban unit (Stone, 1989). The particular nature of the regime is a function of the continually changing combination of institutions, their individually changing goals, and the manner in which they influence each other to attain self interest within a broader project. Urban regime theory highlights the dynamic power relationships between institutions within a regime and between competing regimes. Growth is the usual policy common denominator that brings the regime together. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers have offered constructive cri tiques of urban regime theory. Ward (1996) highlighted the difficulty of applying the theory in contexts other than the USA, where it was developed, and called for consideration of the mechanisms which provoke institutions to form regimes rather than concentrating on how they are maintained. Ward (1996) and Hackworth (2000) critique the localism of ini tial regime theory, and call for consideration of the role of the state apparatus at larger scales, such as the federal state (see federalism) or even the European Union (see regionaLism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Urban regime theory was a response to the economism of previous state theory, but as a result lacks consideration of how regimes become agents of capital accumuLation (Hackworth, 2000). Consideration of environ mental policy has drawn attention to why it is easier to build regimes around particular polices and not others (Gibbs and Jonas, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . neo liberal policies have placed greater emphasis upon governance at the urban scale. Simultaneously, supra state insti tutions such as the European Union have required consideration of how regimes forge links across scales. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Regime theory also applies to co operation between states and non governmental institu tions tackling problems beyond the purview of one state. Environmental, trade and arms control issues are examples around which a regime of legal connections and accepted norms and behaviours are constructed. Con centration upon the idea of a gLobaL com mons and common pooL resources and how they should be managed in an international system of sovereign states (see sovereignty) underlies this approach. Such a regime involves a power dynamic in which the nature of the norms and goals, and the means of maintaining them, are continually negotiated between institutions with differential power capabilities. For example, Evans (2003) illus trates how the ASEAN Regional Forum has adapted to the increase in China?s economic and political capacities. cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Lauria (1997); Rittberger and Mayer (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
region
Most commonly used to designate: (a) an area or zone of indeterminate size on the surface of the Earth, whose diverse elements form a functional association; (b) one such region as part of a system of regions covering the globe; or (c) a portion of one feature of the Earth, as in a particular cLimate region or eco nomic region. The concept of the region, whichever meaning it has been given, has fallen in and out of favour, sometimes simultaneously. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The region has been subject to much exam ination as to its epistemological and ontological status (see epistemoLogy; ontoLogy). How are regions to be known and represented? Do regions exist in actuality? It is probably safe to say that most geographers who have dealt with these questions agree that regions are based on socially constructed generalizations about the world, that their delimitation and representa tion are artefactual but not purely fictions. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Few have disagreed, for example, that every pinpoint on the surface of the Earth is unique: the problem lies in looking past the uniqueness of mere points to say something of note about geographically bounded assembLages and dis tinctions and relations among assemblages (see also idiographic). From this perspective, the artefactuality of regions is not that they are insubstantial (few geographers would claim that they are pure abstractions) so much as their definition demands disregarding certain details. The region in this sense is a ?way of seeing? that which exists, a device for organiz ing thought about the world; it is also, of course, the focus of regional geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The above ideas have given rise to a set of specific terms used to describe regions of different kinds (see Grigg, 1965). Formal or uniform regions are areas defined by one or more of the features that occur within them; for example, a region of Catalan language spe akers or a mining region in some part of the world where mining dominates the economy. Formal/uniform regions are interpretive devices that some geographers have used to make sense of a fundamentally heterogeneous world. There are no purely objective meas ures, therefore, that dictate what proportion of Catalan speakers in an area make it a Catalan speaking region. Nor are there uni versally agreed criteria about what would define a mining region The proportion of mine workers to non mine workers? Income generated by mining compared with non mining income? The land area covered by mines? Criteria are set according to the pur poses of designating such a mining (or Catalan speaking) region at all. The functional or nodal region is a geographically delimited spatial system defined by the linkages binding particular phenomena in that area. Which phenomena? It depends on what kind of sys tem we are interesting in knowing about. The paradigmatic example is the urban region, in which there is posited a spatially delimited network of transactions (e.g. trading) centring on an urban core, or central place, and spread ing out into and functionally incorporating an urban periphery or hinterland. (The func tional region bears a resemblance to the core and periphery of worLd systems theory, and shares some of its criticisms too.) A number of other regional terms have been experimented with, especially in the first half of the twentieth century: single and multiple feature regions, natural regions, cultural regions, generic and spe cific regions, and so on. The geneaLogy of the region concept links it to related terms such as the French pays. Most of these terms are not used with particular fervour any more, at least not in a disciplining defining sense, but the region nonetheless remains a core concept. Certainly, it has played a central role in sutur ing the different realms of human geography and physicaL geography. And it remains a generative force in the geographicaL imagin ation (Hart, 1982; Pudup, 1988; McGee, 1991; Paasi, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The region is also an embattled concept, as Grigg (1965) pointed out several decades ago. Features that may stand in geographical rela tion to each other rarely spatially co vary exactly. The grouping of different phenomena together and the drawing of boundaries around them are therefore by no means obvious. (Although boundary mapping has spawned a great deal of research, using the quantifying tools of descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and most recently geographic information science.) There is the question too of whether the region is too static a con cept, insufficiently attuned to change in the world, and whether regions have been under stood too much in geographical isolation from the world. Grigg took these criticisms to mean that the region, especially its use by geog raphy, needs always to be understood as a means to an end and not an end in itself (cf. Hartshorne, 1939). The point of ?doing? the region is not ultimately to divide the world into regions and rest content. It is rather, if one wishes, to engage in classifying and modelling geographical phenomena so as to generate questions about their variability and functioning with respect to other phenomena. Indeed, for Grigg, whose essay appeared in a seminal text of the quantitative revoLution, the region is a modeL. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the 1980s and 1990s, some geographers proposed to solve the problem of the region by reframing the terms of study and ushering in a ?new regional geography? (e.g. Pudup, 1988; Thrift, 1994b; cf. Gregory, 1982). Spurred on by an interest in structuration theory, sociaL theory, poLiticaL economy and LocaLity studies, the goal was to see the region as a medium and outcome of social practices and relations of power that are operative at multiple spatial and temporal scales, among which the region might serve as a kind of fix. There was also in the new regional geography an explicit critique of an insufficiently spatialized social theory and political economy. There has been some debate as to whether the new regional geography misconstrued the concept and uses of the region during its heyday before the (NEW PARAGRAPH) Second World War, and specifically whether regional geography was an atheoretical geog raphy (see Holmen, 1995). For now, debate seems to have settled down. ghe (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gregory (1982); Grigg (1965); Hart (1982); Pudup (1988). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
regional alliance
An agreement between a group of neighbouring political units facili tating cross border co operation. The term is particularly identified with security co operation between states. NATO is the stron gest such alliance, with the commitment that an attack on any one of the member states by an external aggressor is deemed as an attack against all of them. During the coLd war, the USA (NATO, SEATO, CENTO) and the Soviet Union (Warsaw Pact) created rival regional alliances. Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (see terrorism), the USA has attempted to forge alliances with many countries, but none of the recent efforts have the intensity and breadth of the Cold War era. Post Cold War changes and the break up of the Soviet Union have catalysed new regional initiatives to facilitate trade and eco nomic deveLOPMent (Pinnick, 2005) as states balance the promotion of economic inter action with cross border security concerns, and manage security concerns no longer viewed as part of the Cold War conflict (McNulty, 1999). The increased pressure upon localities to be attractive to global iNvestMent has also fostered local regional alliances to build transport and other forms of economic infrastructure that can not only enhance economic growth but also facilitate peace across international borders (Newman, 2005). The current geopolitical context shows that regional security alliances are in flux as NATO expands its border eastwards to include former Warsaw Pact members (Oas, 2005), but at the same time the European Union builds its own security apparatus that at the moment is deemed to complement NATO, but could succeed it. cf (NEW PARAGRAPH)
regional cycles
Fluctuations or cyclical waves in the level of a variable in a region. Techniques and MOdELs for analysing regional cycles have been applied to both regional eco nomic activity and to EPidEMics and the mod elling of disease. Cycles in economic activity, usually measured by industrial output or unemployment rates, can be very long term, as with ko:nDratiEff cycLes, or shorter term, (NEW PARAGRAPH) reflecting both seasonal variations in the demand for labour and the regional impact of national business cycles of expansion and recession. Some descriptive studies of regional cycles were undertaken in the early years of regionaL science, but more recent work has focused on modelling the cycles. Economists have built regional (e.g. the State of California) and multi regional (e.g. all the regions of France) econometric models. These relate macroeconomic variables of output, expend iture and employment at the regional level to each other, and to national economic and policy variables. Such models now exist for many countries and regions. A second approach, mainly by geographers, has studied the spatial diffusion of regional cycles, tracing the timing and cyclical amplitude for different cities and regions. Lwh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Glickman (1997); King and Clark (1978). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
regional geography
The study of the vari able character of places in the world, usually with an emphasis on their huMan geography. Knowledge of world regional geography is often seen as essential to general education and a specifically ?geographical literacy?, which is why it forms a mainstay of introduc tory survey courses in many universities. Critics frequently complain that such courses are little more than a fact driven whirlwind tour, but regional geography has a long intel lectual history and, like the larger discipline, its role, objectives and methods have changed over time. The authors of the better textbooks are very well aware of these considerations, and sensitive to the pedagogical possibilities they allow and the responsibilities they impose (e.g. Bradshaw, Dymond, White and Chacko, 2005; de Blij and Muller, 2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Regional geography is usually traced back to Strabo?s conception of choroLOgy as the dis ciplined description of the parts of the Earth. As late as the seventeenth century, this con tinued to provide the model for what in early modern Europe was called Special Geography, founded as Bernard Varenius (1622 50) put it ?upon the experience and observations of those who have described the several coun tries?. Studies such as these may have contrib uted to a privileged, civic education, but they had larger purposes too. Just as Strabo?s chorography informed the administration of the Roman Empire, so did Varenius recognize that Special Geography had a particular sig nificance for both ?statecraft? and the world empire of merchant capitalism centred on the Dutch Republic and the city of Amsterdam. And both were haunted by their epistemo logical other: by the mathematical locational corpus of Ptolemy?s Geography and Varenius? own ?General Geography?. All three features reappear in the subsequent history of regional geography in Europe and North America: the production and circulation of regional descriptions for public audiences, the strategic application of regional intelligence, and the formalization of a spatial scientific dual to regional geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the eighteenth century, a European geographical imaginary treated ?europe? as the master architect of an intellectual grid, a sort of semiotic square (see table), in which ?africa?, ?asia? and ?america? were placed in distinctive and subordinate positions within a matrix of difference (Gregory, 1998b). These four cardinal orientations structured the pro duction of regional stereotypes. These were in the main the products of European projects of expLoration, whose results were circulated to a wider public through exhibitions, illustra tions and published accounts of travel. In fact, traveL writing has been a vital source for the production of regions as bounded spaces possessing some sort of unity that makes them distinctive, ?special? or unique. Within this genre, regions are typically represented as dis tinctive zones set off from other regions, whose essential nature at once a matter of ?identity? and ?authenticity? is conveyed through both a narrativization of space (plotting the author?s tracks) and an aestheticization of Landscape (producing a word picture). Their iMagina tive geographies become sedimented over time, so much so that many contemporary travel writings by European and North American authors continue to sustain an elaborate textualization of regions as zones that re inscribe eighteenth and nineteenth century stereotypes: ?the tropics? as a zone of excess, of primeval nature and human abjec tion or plenitude and freedom (see tropicaL ity); ?the Orient? as a liminal zone of mystery and danger, eroticism and transgression (see orientalism); and ?the Arctic? as a limit zone of solitude, silence and extremity (Lutz and Collins, 1993; Holland and Huggan, 1999). These are not (and never were) innocent rep resentations, and similar ways of dividing up the world into regions and identifying their supposedly characteristic natures are activated within other public discourses, including the signature images associated by travel com panies with places such as ?India? or ?China?, the stereotypes of ?the middLe east? invoked by European and American media organiza tions, and the partitional vocabularies of ?balkanization?, enclaves and dominoes (see domino theory) mobilized by contem porary geopolitics. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the academic discipline of geography was drawn to the region as its central object of study. ?Object? is exactly the word: the region was seen as one of the basic ?building blocks? of geographical enquiry. This metaphor clearly conveys the common sense of regionalization as both partitional (the world can be exhaustively divided into bounded spaces) and aggregative (these spaces can be fitted together to form a larger totality). This sensibility applied both to traditional regional geography and to the successor pro jects of spatiaL science. In the regional mono graphs written by French geographer Paul Vidal de le Blache at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, the regions (pays) of France owed their identity (or ?personality?) to the local cultures that impressed themselves on the local landscapes (differentiation) and to their connections with other places within the system of the French nation (circulation; see also areal differenti ation). In the austere lexicon of locational anaLysis, regions were seen as cells within spatial grids. Thus Grigg (1965) argued that ?regionalization is similar to classification?, and his account of the logic of regional taxonomy provided the basis for a series of formal region building aLgorithms in which regions were treated as combinatorial, assignment or districting problems: in effect, as the product of purely technical procedures. To Haggett, Cliff and Frey (1977), therefore, the region was simply ?one of the most logical and satisfactory ways of organizing geographical information? (see also cLassification and regionaLization). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The regional descriptive and the mathemat ical locational impulses were both channelled into the production of regional knowledges during and after the Second World War. Indeed, one geographer claimed that ?World (NEW PARAGRAPH) War II was the best thing that happened to Geography since the birth of Strabo?, because it placed renewed significance on regional geographies and regional intelligence. In the UK, a team of geographers was assembled by the Director of Naval Intelligence to pro duce a series of country by country Admiralty Handbooks, ?the largest programme of geo graphical writing that has ever been attempted? (Clout and Gosme, 2003). In the USA, geo graphy?s central mission within the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services was to provide ?clinical? accounts of target regions, whose function was enhanced by the development of area studies during the coLd war: in parallel, these regional studies were complemented by a mathematical ?Philosophy of Air Power? that was connected to the postwar development of a mathematical statistical macrogeography that heralded ?a new regional conception for geography? that was ?given purpose as part of a broader land scape of militarism and war? (Barnes and Farish, 2006; see also Chow, 2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) But the marriage between the regional descriptive and the mathematical statistical was a shotgun affair, and travel writing and regional geography had little in common with spatial science. In the first place, they both placed a premium on fieLdwork as the experi ential ground for evocative prose, so much so that Hart (1982) hailed regional geography as ?the highest form of the geographer?s art?. How many regional monographs ever reached those commanding heights remains an open question, but Lewis (1985) observed that even if few academic geographers were trained as painters or poets, there was no reason to boast about it. Spatial science found its own aes thetic in the elegance of formal analytical methods and models, and represented regions as little more than convenient ordering devices within an overwhelmingly abstract space. In the second place, travel writing and traditional regional geography sought to convey descrip tions of both cultural and physical landscapes. Vidal de la Blache had assumed an intimacy between culture, landscape and region between paysan, paysage and pays in rural France that placed great demands on the sensibilities of the geographer. In contrast, spatial science was largely preoccupied with functional regions or regional systems in which the central organizing principle was to be found within a society largely severed from its physical landscape (see nodaL region). After the Second World War, for example, Dickinson (1947) proposed a focus on the city region as ?an area of interrelated activities, kindred interests and common organizations, brought into being through the medium of the routes which bind it to urban centres?, and ten years later Philbrick (1957) argued that ?the functional organization of human occupance in area? should be analysed ?independent of the natural environment? (emphasis added) through a series of intrinsically geometric con cepts: focality, localization, interconnection and discontinuity. These proposals formed a springboard for the subsequent leap towards the formal spatial analysis of regions as ?open systems? (Haggett, 1965, pp. 18 19). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Running in the depths of these different literatures and transgressing the boundaries they drew around regions was a sub text that threatened to interrupt and prise open their compartments and closures. The journeys of explorers and traveller writers, the capillary circulations that coursed through regions and the thematization of regions as open systems all spoke to the porosity of regional formations (the networks of connection between places; cf. contrapuNtaL geographies; powEr geom eTry) and to the poetics of regional description (the conventional, ?constructed? nature of boundary delimitation). These twin issues have since received explicit and substantial critical attention. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Even at its height, regional geography was criticized for its closures. Vidal de la Blache?s celebrated Tableau de la geographie de la France (1903) was a portrait some said a landscape painting of the individual regions of pre revolutionary France, produced through a method that critics said had little purchase on the post revolutionary world. ?The region is an eighteenth century concept?, Kimble (1951) declared, whereas in the modern world ?it is the links in landscapes . . . rather than the breaks? that matter. Similarly, Wrigley (1965) argued that the intimacy of the bonds between ?culture? and ?nature? celebrated by regional geography was ?admirably suited to the histor ical geography ofEurope before the industriaL revolution?, but ?with the final disappearance of the old, local, rural, largely self sufficient way of life the centrality of regional work to geography has been permanently affected.? These twin objections were marked both by their European origins and a superficial understanding of industriaLization and the dynamics of the capitalist space economy (which produces regional differentiations rather than erasing them: see Langton, 1984; Storper and Walker, 1989). In fact, Vidal?s later account of France de l?est (1917) was an attempt to wire the industrialization of Alsace Lorraine to the wider geopolitical structures of France as a whole and, en passant, to challenge the legitim acy of its post 1871 occupation by Germany. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Recent attempts to situate regional forma tions and transformations as constellations or condensations within more extensive networks have been far more attentive to such concerns and in the 1980s and 1990s many of them were given a considerable fillip by world systEMs theory and the analysis of the capi talist world economy (see, e.g., Agnew, 1987b; Dixon, 1991; Becker and Egler, 1992). These projects were distinguished by a much greater sense of historicity of PLace and region as historically contingent process (Pred, 1984; Gilbert 1988) which in turn made the ?bounded spaces? and ?building blocks? of conventional regional genres seem much less solid. To talk in this way is not merely to invoke Marx?s description of capit alist MOdERnity as a world in which ?all that is solid melts into air?, important though that is, because the tensions between ?fixity? and ?motion? that spasmodically interrupt and restructure regional formations are not the exclusive preserve of caPitALisM, and are hence not contained by its history alone. Our present understanding of regions suggests that they have never been closed, cellular, bounded spaces: indeed, much of?traditional? regional geography may turn out to have been about inventing a ?traditional? world of supposedly immobile, introspective and irredeemably localized cul tures. Many anthropologists, geographers, his torians and others now accept that non capitalist worlds have also always been actively engaged in other worlds, and that they have also always been constituted through their involvement in trans local and trans regional networks. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In order to develop historical geographies of regional (trans)formation that are open to these possibilities, it is not enough to locate regions within progressively larger global frameworks or to identify the ?regional? as one level within an interlocking system of dif ferent scales. One of the persistent difficulties of such approaches is that regions become products of processes that are located ?on the outside? in the absolute spaces of the con taining frameworks and coordinate systems so that regions become surfaces that merely register the impacts of gLObALization, of successive rounds of capital accuMuLAtion or the division Of LAbour, or of cycles of tiME space compression that are seen as enframing them. Against these ways of figur ing the world, many scholars now argue that such processes are also ?on the inside? indeed, that the demarcations between ?out side? and ?inside? are deeply problematic and made more so by what Hardt and Negri (2000, pp. 194 5) call ?Empire?, where ?the modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and inten sities, of hybridities and artificiality?. Whatever one makes of this particular thesis, there is a broad consensus within human geography that regional formations are more or less impermanent condensations of institutions and objects, people and practices that are intimately involved in the operation and out come of local, trans local and trans regional processes. For much the same reason, even though the ?regional? has constantly been hypostatized as the quintessential scale of geographical analysis, many writers have become much more attentive to the ways in

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