The Dictionary of Human Geography (185 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
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situationists/situationism
The Situationist International (SI) was a group of revolutionar ies based in Western EUROPE between 1957 and 1972, committed to transforming dominant social and spatial relations. Their critiques of capitalist as well as actually existing socialist states owed much to Marx as well as earlier avant gardes such as Dada and surrealism. The group launched an uncompromising attack on the forces upholding what they believed were the alienating conditions of ?the society of the spectacle?, characterized by the increasing colonization of social life by the commodity. They sought to encourage existing revolts against hierarchical power by theoretically and practically articulating forms of revolutionary contestation. At the same time, they experi mented with means of criticizing and freely constructing daily life. Geography was central to this endeavour, as they understood cities in particular as both key sites in the reproduction of social relations of domination, and potential realms of freedom and possibility. The situ ationist Guy Debord thus argued that the ?pro letarian revolution is that critique of human geography whereby individuals and communi ties must construct places and events commen surate with the appropriation, no longer just of their labour, but of their total history? (Debord, 1994 [1967], thesis 178). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The SI remained small, with a total mem bership of 70, from 16 different countries. Developing their positions through a range of texts and artistic, cultural and political activ ities, the situationists were highly critical of the orthodox Left, and referred to undermining rather than contributing to specialist arenas of art and academia. They therefore rejected the term ?situationism?, claiming that it was a meaningless invention by opponents who were seeking to reduce their activities to a fixed dogma. The influence of the situationists has nevertheless been considerable and, after years of marginalization, has been increasingly rec ognized and reassessed. Interest has focused on their critique of the spectacle, and their associated critiques of urbanism and everyday life. Also influential have been practices of psychogeography as means of exploring and seeking ways to transform cities, and tech niques of d?tournement, involving the hijacking of materials to create new meanings and effects (McDonough, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Situationist practices were utopian in their attempts to transform space and society (NEW PARAGRAPH) through the ?construction of situations? and the production of a ?unitary urbanism?, which found its most vivid expression in projects by the Dutch artist Constant for a nomadic and ludic New Babylon, and in their later concern with political theoretical critique in the name of realizing what was hidden yet possible in modern life. Returning to the SI?s utopianism and its critiques of urbanism, is not only of historical interest, it has been argued, but can also serve to challenge how urban spaces are imagined and constructed, and to encourage struggles for alternatives (Pinder, 2005c; see utopia). Resonances between situationist prac tices and contemporary political actions, espe cially over the production and contestation of space and in opposition to spectacular power, further demonstrate that, despite the ?strange respectability? that aspects of their project have recently accrued (Swyngedouw, 2002), they remain politically highly charged. dp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Pinder (2005c). See also Situationist International Online, at http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/. (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Sjoberg model
A model of social and spa tial order of the pre industrial city, first expressed in Gideon Sjoberg?s book of the same title (1960). Sjoberg?s model arises from his desire to provide a critique of, and alterna tive to, the concentric zonal model of the city offered by Ernest Burgess and, more generally, of human ecology as applied by prominent members of the chicago school. As such, Sjoberg?s work was part of a larger project, initiated by Walter Firey (1947), to replace human ecology with structural functional ism as the central paradigm of urban sociology (p. 12). The major factors used to explain urban morphology in Sjoberg?s model are social structure and technology. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sjoberg begins by differentiating between non urban, feudal and industrial societies. He is concerned with the second of these: societies that utilize animate sources of energy, and are literate and urbanized, including all world civilizations prior to the industrial revolution as well as non industrialized contemporary societies. He argues that feudal, or pre industrial, societies everywhere, and through time, are characterized by similar technological achievements and a three tiered class structure that includes a small ruling class, a large lower class and outcast groups. The ruling class, comprised of those in reli gious and administrative authority, establishes a social order that reproduces its control over succeeding generations: urbanization is both the outcome of social stratification and a means whereby hegemony is perpetu ated. The morphology of pre industrial cities reflects this interdependence between social and spatial order: power is consolidated by the ruling class through its residential location in the city centre, the most protected and most accessible district. Here, residents forge a social solidarity based on their literacy, access to the surplus (which is stored in the central area of the city), and shared upper class culture, which includes distinctive manners and patterns of speech. Elite cluster ing in the city centre is reinforced by the lack of rapid transportation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The privileged central district is surrounded by haphazardly arranged neighbourhoods housing the lower class. Households in these areas are sorted by occupation/income (mer chants near the centre, followed by minor bur eaucrats, artisans and, finally, the unskilled), ethnic origin and extended family networks. Merchants are generally not accorded elite status, since power is achieved through reli gious and military control, while trade is viewed with suspicion. The model is less clear on the residential placement of outcast groups (typically slaves and other conquered peoples): some of these perform service roles and are intermingled with the rest of the urban population, while others live at the extreme periphery of the city frequently beyond its walls. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In formulating this model, Sjoberg reverses the logic used by Burgess who placed com mercial activities at the centre of the city, and a succession of poor through wealthy residential districts around it. Sjoberg notes that the Burgess model is applicable only to industrial cities, where production and commerce propel economic growth and where capitalists are accorded high social standing. Further, he argues that human ecology incorrectly treats urbanization as an independent social force, when in reality urban growth should be seen as a ?dependent variable?, as it depends on the distribution of social power, and on available technology. Empirical investigations of the Sjoberg model have been generally supportive, but caution that the model cannot account for the intricate details of urban development across different cultural contexts. Others have criticized the theoretical content of Sjoberg?s work, especially his stress on the role of tech nology and his uncritical view of social power. Sjoberg?s functionalist logic (which blurs dis tinctions between causes and consequences), (NEW PARAGRAPH) however, remains largely unnoticed and unchallenged (see functionalism). dh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Carter (1983); Langton (1975); Ley (1983); Morris (1994); Radford (1979); Wheatley (1963). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
skid row
Essentially a North American term, ?skid row? traditionally referred to areas characterized by concentrations of rooming houses and accommodation for single men working in the timber industry: over time, the term has become a more general short hand for areas where homelessness is evident. Often offering hostel or temporary accommo dation, skid rows are thus notorious as spaces of rough sleeping, with temporary pavement encampments or ?cardboard cities? offering refuge for those who congregate in these areas. In the larger skid rows, intricate social net works and relationships may develop within the community, as well as between the service dependent and those service providers who seek to assist them with welfare, alcohol, drug and health issues (Rowe and Wolch, 1990). In many instances, dwellers of areas described as skid row districts have fought to contest this designation: despite this, the term persists in the North American social imagin ation as a pejorative description of the social margins of the city. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Studies by urban sociologists and geograph ers have suggested that the development of skid row areas in North American cities has, in some cases, been connected to policies of containment designed to remove street home less populations from wealthier locales. Yet currently the number of skid row districts is declining markedly, as corporate gentrification of the central city squeezes homeless popula tions from sites that they have sometimes occupied for decades see, for example, Smith (1996b) on the forcible removal of the homeless and itinerant population from Tompkins Square Park, New York. In such instances, anti begging ordinances and zoning laws have been used to disperse visible home less populations and ?sanitize? areas prior to gentrification. Although the erasure of such ?landscapes of despair? should not be a cause for regret, it generates some significant questions about how welfare providers might best target resources to increasingly dispersed homeless populations (Lee and Price Spratlen, 2004), as well as raising the spectre of the increased privatization of pub lic space. As such, the disappearance of skid row areas is rarely taken as evidence of an (NEW PARAGRAPH) improving urban quality of life, but is seen to be symptomatic of societies where the disad vantaged have less ?right to the city? (Mitchell, 1997a). ph (NEW PARAGRAPH)
slavery
A condition ofbondage and servi tude in which one person owns another, for cibly exacts labour and services from them, and excludes them from civil society. Slavery has ancient roots in disparate parts of the world and has taken multiple forms. But up to the nineteenth century all empires were slave owning societies, and slavery has been conceptualized by historians as a mode of production that both preceded and coexisted with feudalism and with capitalism. The close connections between slavery and colo nialism found their principal expression in the transatlantic slave trade, which reached its heyday during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fed burgeoning European consumer markets with sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice and later cotton, and as Blackburn (1998) shows, was driven more by private capital and mer cantile initiative than by state sponsorship. An estimated 11.8 million slaves chiefly from West Africa were put to work on plantations, and millions died of starvation and sickness in the perilous sea voyage to America. A con siderable literature on plantation life in Brazil, the Caribbean and the American South examines spatial strategies of power and resist ance, modes of paternalism and hegemony, and the role of gender, sexuality and African culture in the making of slave and Creole communities (see also transculturation). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The abolition of colonial chattel slavery stemmed from both metropolitan and colonial agitation, and cannot simply be explained in economic terms (e.g. in terms of the declining value of Caribbean sugar colonies). On the one hand, the British and French represented abolition as a distinctly Western triumph, and strong public sentiment created what David Brion Davis (cited in Lambert, 2005, p. 10) describes as ?a profound change in the basic paradigm of social geography a conceptual differentiation between... a ??slave world?? aberration and a ??free world?? norm?. But the formal demise of slavery also stemmed from slave rebellions and struggles over citizenship and human rights that articulated ideas of race, nation and empire in complex ways (Dubois, 2004). Such struggles had a much greater impact on enlightenment thought than has hitherto been recognized, and recent historical and geographical work on the mutual constitution of white and black identity, and the diasporic and transnational identities and communities shaped by slavery (a ?Black Atlantic? based on a shared history of commercial interaction and social degrad ation), demonstrates the need for more integrated and ?networked? (less rigidly hier archical) understandings of the exactions and impositions bound up with this mode and phase of colonization and European commer cial outreach. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The distinction between slavery and other forms of servitude has never been clear cut, and in spite of the nineteenth century aboli tion of colonial slavery, slavery like practices have persisted, in systems of indentured labour, and state servitude in fascist Germany, communist China and the Soviet Union. The United Nations currently extends the definition of slavery to an array of wide spread human rights abuses (forced labour, refugee exploitation, prostitution, pornog raphy, people trafficking and the use of chil dren in armed conflict). Contemporary globalization, like the colonial and imperial globalizations that preceded it, depends on transnational flows of labour: for millions, however, the conditions of movement and the coercion of labour has transformed them into what Bales (2004) calls ?disposable people?. The crucial axis here is not racializa tion but, rather, gender and age: most of them, perhaps 80 per cent, are female and around 50 per cent are children. Many of these victims have been induced into crossing borders to escape poverty and find employ ment; in order to pay their traffickers, they are required to work to pay off their ?debt? (many never do) in return for elemental food and shelter. Trafficking and slavery cannot simply be folded into one another the two are con ceptually and legally distinct (Manzo, 2005) but it is clear that slavery may well occur in the course of trafficking, and that both involve extreme forms of exploitation, usually by criminal gangs. Contemporary slavery cannot entail legal ownership, but violence nonethe less establishes a regime of control, coercion and dependence that amounts to effective ownership. More than 40 per cent of the victims are forced into the sex trades (cf. Samarasinghe, 2005), while another 32 per cent are domestic servants or construction workers. In June 2006 the US government estimated that 600,000 800,000 people were subjected to such labour bondage each year. The major destinations are Europe, North America and the middle east. Many millions more endure bonded labour as a (NEW PARAGRAPH) means of paying off a debt or a loan in their own countries, especially in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. When these are included, the International Labour Organization estimates that the minimum total of people enduring some form of forced servitude is 12.3 million, while Bales (2004, p. 8) puts the figure at 27 million: both esti mates are more than the total number caught up in the horrors of the Black Atlantic (Epstein, 2006). Del (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bales (2004); Drescher and Engerman (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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