The Dictionary of Human Geography (182 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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segregation, measurement of
Social scien tists have long tried to find ways of depicting and measuring the degree of segregation between groups in societies, especially cities. In early discussions of this topic, such as the classic studies by sociologists collectively known as the chicago school, segregation was portrayed in descriptive terms. Ernest Burgess (1967), for example, included maps that characterized areas of Chicago as the ?Deutschland Ghetto?, ?Little Sicily? and the ?Black Belt?. But these terms were highly generalized and none of the areas identified on the maps held completely mono ethnic popu lations. Over the past century, sociologists and geographers have struggled to find more accur ate ways to visualize and analyse segregation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The social geography of a specific group is usually depicted in maps that are either based on standard percentage figures or as location quotients (LQs). These maps show areas where a group is concentrated, providing a visual demonstration of the degree of segrega tion involved. A group that is fully integrated into the population at large would be evenly distributed across the territory in question (with all LQ figures close to 1.0), while a completely segregated (ghettoized) group would be concentrated in a single area, with low LQ figures throughout the map except in the area of concentration. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While maps such as these are undoubtedly an improvement over the impressionistic gen eralizations made in early sociological studies, they remain ambiguous. More precise statis tics designed to represent the degree of segre gation of groups were first introduced in the late 1940s and two gained ascendancy after a crucial paper published in the mid 1950s (Duncan and Duncan, 1955). The Index of Dissimilarity is a measure of the degree of resi dential isolation between two groups and is calculated as: (NEW PARAGRAPH) 1 k (NEW PARAGRAPH) IDxy = [X yi (NEW PARAGRAPH) 2 i 1 (NEW PARAGRAPH) where ID is the Index of Dissimilarity between groups x and y; xi and yi are the percentages of the two groups that reside in a particular spa tial unit, such as a Census Tract, in a city (note that the difference in these percentages is taken as an absolute value and there are no negative numbers used in the calculation of the ID); and k is the number of spatial units that make up the whole. Arithmetically, the index shows the proportion of group x that would have to change its location in order to match the distribution of group y. An ID value of 0 means the two groups are precisely co located across the city or region in question, while a value of 100 would mean that the two do not overlap at all. The Index of Segregation (IS) is calculated in much the same way, but between an individual group and all other groups in a society; IS values also range from 0 to 100. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although the ID and IS have been the most enduring measures of segregation, they share a number of problems. First, there is no straightforward way to decide when an ID or IS value is significant. After considerable debate, researchers have developed a consen sus that values under 25 indicate little or no segregation, while those over 60 are inter preted as indicating a high level of segregation. Second, both indices are scale dependent: they tend to be higher when a city or region is divided into a larger number of administra tive units (Johnston, Forrest and Poulson, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . For this reason, comparisons of index values over time or between cities are suspect, unless the scale of spatial units is constant (which is relatively rare, particularly in inter national comparisons; see Van Valley and Roof, 1976). Third, index values for groups with small populations tend to be higher than those for groups that are large. Finally, indices speak to the degree of isolation of a group but do not describe particular spatial patterns. For example, the IS for a group that is entirely located in one inner city neighbourhood, which is the only group in that place, would be 100. But the IS would also be 100 for a group located in four different suburbs if it was the only group in those areas. The reasons for these segregated patterns could be entirely different (the first group could be impover ished while the latter could be affluent), but the IS values would be the same. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A number of efforts have been made to pro vide better measures of segregation. These are summarized by Massey and Denton (1986), who discuss five dimensions of segregation (and measures associated with each). In addi tion to isolation or dissimilarity, they describe: concentration versus dispersion; centralization versus dispersion; clustering among groups (e.g. individual European origin groups may be isolated from one another, but all European origin groups could be in the same general area of a city that is distinct from the location of Asians, Hispanics etc.); and the degree of exposure between groups (also see Lieberson, 1981). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite the proliferation of indices, the ID and IS measures remain the most widely used, perhaps due to their ease of interpret ation and mathematical simplicity. Also, these indices are adaptable to other types of study. For example, the same logic and formulae can be used to measure the degree of occupational segmentation, and in this case the IS would indicate the proportion of a group that would have to change occupations in order to have the same distribution in the labour market as the general population (e.g. Hiebert, 1999). dh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Massey and Denton (1986); Peach (1975). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
self-determination
The perceived right of a cultural group who identify with a particular piece of territory to control their political future. The concept falls within the broader political ideology of nationalism, but has a specific focus on the politics of overthrowing what is seen as unjust control of territory by an external power. Self determination has been a rallying cry against imperialism and coloni alism, and is supported by the United Nations Charter. Indigenous groups, such as Native Americans and other ?first peoples?, are con temporary advocates of self determination politics, following the wave of decoloniza tion after the Second World War. cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Macedo and Buchanan (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
sense of place
This term is usually taken to refer to the attitudes and feelings that individ uals and groups hold vis a vis the geographical areas in which they live. It further commonly suggests intimate, personal and emotional relationships between self and place. Thus, in early humanistic geography, a ?sense of place? was understood largely in terms of posi tive affective qualities of place attachment; that is, senses of affection, attachment and belonging and even ?love of place? (topophi lia: see Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977). Such work belongs to a long standing (and still influen tial; see Casey, 1998) phenomenological tradition in which place is presented as the meaningful, even potentially redemptive counter to abstract, rationalist and unlocalized notions of ?space?. However, the more critical approaches characteristic of social and cul tural geographies from the 1980s onwards have more often sought to highlight how such positive senses of place and identity may in fact often be based upon the symbolic and physical exclusion of those deemed to be ?out of place? (Cresswell, 1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Equally, much early work on senses of place (e.g. Relph, 1976) subscribed at least impli citly to a particular historical narrative in which supposedly authentic or original forms of place based community or dwelling are seen as being progressively eroded by eco nomic and cultural forces such as urbaniza tion, industrialization and globalization. These forces are understood as working to occlude the distinctiveness of particular places and cultures, so producing an increasingly ?placeless? world. But in explicit contrast to such accounts, Doreen Massey?s (1994a) influ ential essay on a ?global sense of place? sought to advance a conception of place as porous, outward looking and progressive, as opposed to conservative, enclosed and unitary. The development of a progressive sense of place, for Massey, involves rejecting false nostalgia for pre modern singular and coherent places, and embracing instead the culturally multiple, dynamic and connective aspects of place in a globalizing world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While Massey?s work has opened up new agendas for geographical research on senses of place, older usages of the term, in which senses of attachment and belonging are fore grounded as investigative objects, continue to be productively elaborated and refined, most notably in Feld and Basso?s (1998) North American based collection Senses of place. jwy (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Feld and Basso (1998); Massey (1994); Relph (1976). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
sequence analysis
An exploratory data analysis technique for analysing longitu dinal data. Social behaviours, such as hous ing careers defined in terms of tenure and price (Clark, Deurloo and Dieleman, 2003), are likely to be patterned with many sequences that are only trivially different across different households. Unlike other techniques, such as event history analysis, the aim is not to work spell by spell, trying to account for the transi tion from one state to another. In contrast, sequence analysis works holistically (Pollock, 2007), classifying ordered sequences into a relatively few characteristic trajectories and then seeking to examine what determines mem bership of a particular trajectory. Trajectories can be defined in both time and space, so that this approach can be used to identify common time geographic paths (Shoval and Isaacson, 2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A key part of the approach is that ordered sequences are clustered into a data driven typology, according to some algorithm such as ?optimal matching? (Abbott and Tsay, 2000), which grew out of techniques devel oped during the 1980s and employed by bio chemists to analyse DNA sequences. This works by measuring the dissimilarity of every pair of sequences by calculating the relative effort (the ?cost?) needed to transform one sequence into another. Transformations are of three types substitutions, insertions, dele tions and the user may attach a differential cost to each type of change so that, for example, moving from the rented sector to owner occupation may be given a higher cost than the opposite move. Dissimilarity is then defined as the minimum cost of transforming one sequence into another; the overall matrix of dissimilarities between all pairs can then be input to a cluster analysis, which groups together similar paths (cf. classification and regionalization). The popularity of the approach can be expected to increase as more longitudinal data and general purpose soft ware for quantitative analysis become available (Brzinsky Fay and Luniak, 2006). kj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) The publicly available software Transition Data Analysis has facilities to undertake sequence an alysis (http://steinhaus.stat.ruhr uni bochum.de/ tda.html). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
sequent occupance
?The view of geography as a succession of stages of human occupance . . . which establishes the genetics of each stage in terms of its predecessor? (Whittlesey, 1929; cf. settlement continu ity). As this suggests, Whittlesey like other European and North American geographers in the early twentieth century was strongly influ enced by biological models. He acknowledged that the analogy between ?sequent occupance in chorology? and plant succession in botany would be ?apparent to all?, but he insisted that his own conception of cultural historical geog raphy was more intricate. While ?human occu pance of area, like other biotic phenomena, carries within itself the seeds of its own trans formation,? such uninterrupted or ?normal? progressions would be ?rare, perhaps only ideal, because extraneous forces are likely to interfere with the normal course, altering either its direction, or rate, or both? and ?breaking or knotting the thread of sequent occupance?. Whittlesey?s thesis directly resembles Frederick Jackson Turner?s frontier thesis: both men (NEW PARAGRAPH) came from the American Midwest, and the transition from rural to urban societies was within living memory for them and their contemporaries. The idea was used more loosely by later cultural geographers to refer to little more than the claim that cultural landscapes contain traces from the earlier stages of settlement (cf. Broek, 1932, which is usually regarded as the classic application). The biological metaphor was in decline in social science even as Whittlesey was writing, however, and in some ways the popularity of the thesis reflects the (then) isolation of human geography among the social sciences in North America (Herbst, 1961). gk (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Whittlesey (1929). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
services
Services have historically been defined as ?activities which are relatively detached from material production and which as a consequence do not directly involve the processing of physical materials. The main differences between manufacturing and ser vice products seems to be that the expertise provided by services relies much more directly on work force skills, experience, and know ledge than on physical techniques embodied in machinery or processes? (Marshall, Wood, Daniels et al. 1988, p. 11). Geographers have produced a substantial and still growing cor pus of work on services, one by product of which has been to confirm the difficulty of working with these sorts of general statements. It is clear that there is no single geography of services, and there are diminishing conceptual returns of thinking of services in this way. Rather, there is a whole set of different geog raphies of services, which vary according to the characteristics of the specific industry. The most recent definitional work has used binaries either/ors to produce more specific definitions. So, terms such as producer ser vices or consumer services, public services or private services, and tradeable or non tradeable services have been used. While these distinctions are an improvement on past gen eralizations, they pose their own problems. How to move beyond oppositional definitions? What is it that binds different services together or distinguishes them? For some, rather than seeing manufacturing and services as discrete, as separate entities, there is a need to concep tualize the commodity chains or production networks that link them (Henderson, Dicken, Hess, Coe and Yeung, 2001). If we trace these, then we generate a different set of insights into the service component in ?manufacturing? and the manufacturing component in ?services?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The most recent work on the geographies of services has developed around four broad themes (Dicken, 2006). The first is the inter nationalization or globalization of service firms, with attention to why, how and to what effect they are becoming international in scope. In tandem with this emphasis on the dynamics of geographical expansion has come a widening in those industries in which geog raphers have performed empirical studies. We know now more about what is going on in more service industries. The second theme is the intra organizational dynamics of the ser vice industries; in particular, on the strategies of small and medium sized firms. In some parts of the world it is these types of com panies, and not the largest transnational corporations, that are behind the growth of urban and regional economies. The third theme is the emergence of the knowledge economy: the rise of service activities as a function of the production and circulation of knowledge, and the growth of the knowledge industries accountancies, business schools, consultancies of all types, law firms and so on directed towards the construction of knowledge for economic gain. The fourth theme is performance and, specifically, the ways in which services are ?performed?, reflect ing the imprint of the cultural turn on eco nomic geography (Thrift, 2005b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These re definitions and conceptual ela borations are vital because services have increased their absolute and relative import ance in the economy (Bryson, Daniels and Warf, 2004). Service industries now contrib ute significantly to the economic performance of nations and cities and employ a growing number of workers. While geographers, and other social scientists, have been disputing how best to define services, others have been debating their economic importance, making political cases for and against particular forms of state intervention on the basis of projected economic impacts. This emphasis on service industries only reconfirms the importance of the work of geographers in this area of research. KWa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bryson, Daniels and Warf (2004); Dicken (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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