The Dictionary of Human Geography (194 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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spectacle
A term that often refers to a large scale cultural event, festival or celebration, or to an urban scene or stage set presented for visual consumption. It has been prominent in analyses of the significance of image produc tion and the management of appearance in strategies of urban development in recent dec ades, with attention focusing in particular on temporary cultural events such as carnivals, International Expositions and sporting events, including the Olympic Games (Gold and Gold, 2005), as well as on more permanent spaces of entertainment, ?theme park urban ism' and ?cities of spectacle'. The use of spec tacular events has a long history, from the ?bread and circuses' of ancient times to efforts to promote European medieval city states and metropolises of the nineteenth century. Yet the production of spectacles has become a com mon part of cultural strategies of economic development more recently, with studies exploring their implications for capital invest ment, cultural identity and tourism, and drawing out their multiple and contested read ings by audiences. Many critics argue that such spectacles serve a diversionary function, masking underlying social and economic inequalities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A key reference in critical discussions is Guy Debord's book The society of the spectacle, first published in 1967. This is concerned less with spectacles as cultural events than with the spectacle in a critique of an alienated and image saturated world. Developing earlier Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism and alienation, Debord writes that the spec tacle ?corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its coloniza tion of social life? (1994 [1967], thesis 42). This new stage in the accumulation of capital and the domination of social life by the econ omy is not simply the result of mass media manipulation and visual technologies, he stresses, for ?the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images? (thesis 29). urbanism takes on particular importance within the spectacle as a technique for reshaping space and ensuring the separ ation between people, although it is also a terrain within which struggles against the spec tacle and for different relationships between people are forged. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As developed by Debord and the situation ists, the concept of the spectacle was part of a revolutionary project and was meant to be a weapon with which to harm spectacular soci ety. This has not prevented it from being widely adopted within cultural, media and urban studies seeking to characterize a new cultural and mediatized era, and becoming ?a stock phrase in a wide range of critical and not so critical discourses? (Crary, 1989, p. 97). Yet emphasizing its original analytical force, the group RETORT (2005) insists that Debord?s account speaks powerfully to a cur rent ?new age of war?, in which struggles over images and the capitalist state?s concern with the rule of appearances are of vital political significance. dp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Debord (1994 [1967]). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
spontaneous settlement
A residential area developed outside the formal economy by its inhabitants, often after illegally occupying the land, and usually found in developing coun tries. Both the housing and infrastructure of public facilities are constructed outside the usual market and public service mechanisms. Although the term ?spontaneous? suggests no forethought or planning, many such clandes tine settlements are the result of ?planned inva sions? by the initial occupants, who subdivide the land on a pre arranged cadastre and provide a basic infrastructure (cf. squatting). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Lloyd (1979). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
sport(s)
hUMAn geography has paid increased attention to sports partly as a result of the increased economic and cultural importance given to issues of Leisure and rec reation, but most especially because insights from cultural theory have been brought to bear on the performance of sports. Studies commonly take one of five approaches: (NEW PARAGRAPH) The plotting of the economic connec tions and organizations of sports. This follows the fortunes of ?mega events? such as the Olympics or soccer World Cup, and their linkage to patterns of urban development, or the competition over sport club franchises and stadia location. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The diffusion and location of different sports across the globe. This tracks the relative popularity and adoption of dif ferent games, often as a cultural form in berKeLey schooL approaches to cul turaL geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The development and often hybridiza tion of these sports in a colonial and post colonial world (see coLoniaLism; hybrid ity; post coLoniaLism). They become examples of contestation of meaning and adoption of cultural practices. Thus the imposition of cricket ovals across South Asia, its enthusiastic adoption and the transport of the game to the West Indies are used by C.L.R. James in his Beyond a boundary to suggest that it offers both in sights into colonizing cultures and a styl ization of resistance to that process. The postwar adoption of baseball in Japan also offers moments of cultural contact, under standing and transformation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A historicaL geography of the emer gence and role of sports in varying social milieu. The rise of organized mass spec tator sports alongside industriaLiza tion, complementing or even replacing other modes of regulation, is important here, as is the construction of progres sively more homogenized fields, arenas and venues as forms of abstract space. The rapid mediatization of team sport and the culture of viewing has been re lated to the society of the spectacLe, where a televisual temporality and dramatization is now driving sport. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The emergence on and off the pitch of tech niques of the body that form exemplars of discipLinary power and the mobilization and channelling of collective affect to cre ate an emotionaL geography of support, loyalty, joy and suffering. The surging crowd at a game, or indeed around a large screen, enact changing performances of emotionality, race and gender. Alterna tively, the body cultures in recreations and outdoor sports offer new ways to think about people?s modes of engagement with landscape. mc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bale (2002); Cronin and Bale (2002); James (NEW PARAGRAPH) (2005); Roche (2000); Smart (2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
sprawl
Dispersed, low density development on the edges of urban areas, characterized by fragmented and ribbon development. It is often associated with edge cities and with bland, car oriented and functionally segre gated Landscapes. While sprawl is often asso ciated with a lack of planning, others suggest that government policies and public agencies, influencing decisions about road construction, housing financing and zoning, for instance, have shaped the rise of sprawling cities (e.g. Wolch, Pastor and Dreier, 2004). ?Sprawl? is also a highly political word, framing debate over the loss of agricultural land and wildlife habitat, the costs of automobile use, and appropriate design and policy solutions (Duany, Plater Zyberk and Speck, 2000). em (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wolch, Pastor and Dreier (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
squatting
Dwelling in a home built on land that does not belong to the builder, typically without the consent of the land owner, in the absence of formal planning and regulation. In many countries in the world, a significant pro portion of the population lives in squatter housing; for instance, this is the case for roughly half of the residents in Istanbul or Delhi. Squatter housing is typically built quickly to establish a de facto claim, and basic infrastructure for water, drainage, sanita tion, electricity and roads is at first missing. Squatter settlements are often built on state owned land, located on the periphery of an urban area (though relative centrality can change as cities grow up to and around them), or on unproductive land such as swamps, saline flats or steep hillsides. Although squat ter housing exists outside private property relations, it can be commodified and traded (see commodity; market): over one third of squatter housing in Turkey is rented, and in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s the sec ondary housing market in squatter dwellings bore a striking resemblance to the parallel legal real estate market (Smart, 1986). Although most of the world?s squatting occurs in the cities of the global south, there have been squatters? movements in European and North American cities, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s; at moments of housing shortage, squatters occupied vacant buildings without the consent of owners, to gain access to affordable housing and often as a critique of private property relations and urban restruc turing (Pruijt, 2003: see also homeLessness; sLum). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the late 1960s, academics studying the global South began to reassess the earlier view that squatter settlements were a ?cancer on the carapace of the city? (quoted in Gonzalez de la Rocha, Perlman, Safa, Jelin, Roberts and Ward, 2004) or evidence of dysfunctional urbanism. Studying settlements that had ?consolidated? over time, they stressed the existence of sociaL networks in squatter communities and began to conceive of them as rational and viable responses to rapid urbanism, as a solution to rather than a prob lem of massive rural to urban migration. This view continues to inform Hernando De Soto?s (1989) influential celebration of the entrepre neurialism and capacity for self organization within squatter settlements (now taken up by the World Bank). De Soto recommends that property ownership be extended to squatters to facilitate their capacity to petition the state for more services and to use their property as collateral to obtain loans, which then can be used to improve their property or invest in small businesses. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A critical literature has arisen to argue, first, that consolidation and stabilization of squat ter communities can happen in the absence of private property ownership (Varley, 2002) and, second, that there are serious limits to addressing issues of poverty and social mar ginalization through land titling and upgrades to housing and urban infrastructure (Roy, 2005). Extending private property ownership can lead to gentrification and displacement, and the consolidation of patriarchaL power relations (given that land title is typically granted to the male househoLd head), and there is little evidence that land title opens assess to credit or alters employment condi tions (Gonzalez de la Rocha, Perlman, Safa, Jelin, Roberts and Ward, 2004; Roy, 2005). Among scholars from Latin america, there is less optimism now about the prospects for those living in squatter settlements. The structural adjustment and austerity policies of the 1980s followed by the neo liberal restructuring (see neo LiberaLism) of the 1990s led to rising unemployment, declining opportunities in informal sectors, the devolu tion of the delivery of social goods to non governmental organizations (see ngo), and increasing often drug related vioLence. Perlman notes of Rio de Janeiro, ?After many decades of co existence, Rio?s populous has again begun to fear and shun the favelas due to a sharp increase in violence. Although the favelados [residents of squatter communities] themselves are no longer considered marginal, (NEW PARAGRAPH) the physical territory of their communities has become tightly controlled by the drug dealers, who . . . are known locally as ??the marginality'' or ??the movement'' ' (Gonzalez de la Rocha, Perlman, Safa, Jelin, Roberts and Ward, 2004, pp. 189 90). In other con texts, there is more optimism about the potential for squatter mobilization (Appadurai, 2001). gp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gonzalez de la Rocha, Perlman, Safa, Jelin, Roberts and Ward (2004); Roy (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
stages of growth
The notion that soci eties, polities or entire civilizations pass through stages or phases in their development, growth or maturation has a long intellectual lineage, and has been associated with very different forms of theorizing. Within certain forms of marxism, history as the succession of modes of production or the need to pass through particular stages of economic organ ization has a long pedigree (Cohen, 1978). From a very different vantage point, the the ories of Arnold Toynbee (1889 1975) and Joseph Spengler (1912 91) also contained strong senses of historical progression through epochs or stages. Within twentieth century sociology it was modernization theory that exemplified the clearest instance of the sutur ing of evolution, teleology and economic history as a predetermined progression through stages of social, economic and polit ical transformation along a path blazed by capitalist powers in Western Europe. It was from within this body of work that the notion of modernization as the culmination of a suc cession of stages out of backwardness received its fullest elaboration, and will be forever asso ciated with the ideas of W.W. Rostow (1916 (NEW PARAGRAPH) and his foundational text The stages of economic growth: a non communist manifesto, first published in 1960 (see Rostow, 1971). Like other modernization theorists, Rostow believed that the world was constituted by a fundamental rift between ?traditional? societies supposedly mired in anti or non market mentalities, limited markets, pre Newtonian science and a belief structure antithetical to self sustaining growth and modern societies that emerged in their modal form in seven teenth and eighteenth century europe (see modernity). Rostow drafted his book against a backdrop of McCarthyism, a deep ideo logical and political cold war between East and west, and a massive effort by the USA to export development through USAID and other foreign aid channels to an increas ingly insurgent third world, led by a raft of African and Asian post colonial (or about to become post colonial) states (see decolonization). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In Rostow?s iteration a model explicitly presented, as Rostow's subtitle indicates, as an alternative to the idea of socialist modern ization and the account of development set out by Marx and Engels in The communist mani festo (see historical materialism) modern history was the transformation of tradition via a five stage programme, through which all societies were to pass. The first of the five stages the traditional society is characterized by ?primitive? technology, hierarchical social structures (the precise nature of which is not specified) and behaviour conditioned more by custom and ascription rather than by what Rostow takes to be ?rational' criteria. These characteristics combine to place a ceiling on production possibilities. Outside stimuli to change (including, for example, colonialism and the expansion of capitalism) are admitted in the transitional second stage the precondi tions for take off. Here, a rise in the rate of productive investment, the provision of social and economic infrastructure, the emer gence of a new, economically based elite and an effective centralized national state are indispensable to what is to follow. In short, the opportunities for profitable investment presented by the preconditions for take off are unlikely to be ignored by capital and they pave the way for the third stage: ?takeoff? into sustained growth. Rostow describes this stage as ?the great watershed in the life of modern soci eties?. It is a period of around 10 30 years during which growth dominates society, the economy and the political agenda (although the social relations which facilitate this dom inance are not described) and investment rises, especially in the leading sectors of manu facturing industry. Self sustaining growth results in the fourth stage, ?drive to maturity?, which is characterized by diversification as most sectors grow, imports fall and productive investment ranges between 10 and 20 per cent of national income. The increasing import ance of consumer goods and services and the rise of the welfare state indicate that the final stage, the ?age of high mass consump tion?, has been reached (see also post indus trial society). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In some respects, the determinism of Rostow's model was not too different from some of the worst excesses of structural Marxist political economy. Whether it constitutes a theory or is little more than a taxonomy remains subject to debate, although Rostow certainly did knit together ideas that were found prominently among his contemporaries, such as Albert Hirschmann and Alexander Gerschenkron. Yet his insistence on placing growth in a wider historical and social context and on a disag gregated approach that reflects the uneven nature of deveLopment (cf. uneven develop ment) marks a substantial advance upon abstracted and formal theories of economic growth. And yet these same characteristics expose its universalist cast: the model of eco nomic development derived from the stages is teleological, mechanical, a historical and ethnocentric: (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is teleological in the sense that the end result (stage 5) is known at the outset (stage 1) and derived from the historical geography of ?developed? societies, which then form the template for the ?under developed?, which are thereby denied an historical geography of their own. (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is mechanical in that, despite the claim that the stages have an inner logic ?rooted in a dynamic theory of production?, the underlying motor of change is not explained, so that as a result the stages become little more than a classificatory system based on data for fifteen countries only, plus outline data for others. (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is a historical in that notions of path dependency are ignored, so that it can be assumed that the historical geographies of the underdeveloped countries are un affected by that of the dependent, and so the intervention of the latter into the for mer is simply an irrelevance this position is also profoundly a geographical, as it is incapable of recognizing that geographical relationships are continuously formed and re formed across the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is ethnocentric in espousing a future for the world based on American history and aspiring to American norms of high mass consumption (see ethnocentrism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Capitalist society is, following Rostow?s logic, a necessary consequence of development. By concealing the social production of the stages, capitalist societies may be reproduced and extended by apparently neutral policies advocating apparently universal processes of growth. History, in other words, is serial repe tition (in the argot of the present: ?there is no alternative?). In the context of the 1950s and 1960s, the non communist manifesto was nothing short of an ideoLogy for american empire. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Rostow saw his academic work as part of a political mission, and under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson he held positions with authority over US policy towards the Third World (see Menzel, 2006). He was a brilliant student a Rhodes scholar in the 1930s and he gravitated towards imperial trade policy, serving briefly, after a period on the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, as a professor of American History at Oxford. He returned to the USA in 1947, served as an assistant to Gunnar Myrdal at the United Nations and at the tender age of 33 was appointed to the chair of Economic History at MIT. It was here, during the Korean War, that Rostow and a group of other cold warriors developed a strategy for the eco nomic containment of communism. Key to this strategy, which emerged more fully in the 1960s, was the sense that containment was to be achieved within the ?emerging nations? of the Third World, that external foreign assist ance was key to shift poor nations from stages 2 to 3 (the alternative was the fostering of preconditions conducive to communism), an alliance with robustly anti communist mod ernizing elites, and a strong state enhanced by a large military budget to push forward the long march through the stages to self sustaining capitalist growth. Of course, it all went horribly wrong. The hubris of power was radically compromised in Vietnam (in which Rostow served a bleak and hawk like function under President Johnson: Milne (2008) refers to him as ?America?s Rasputin?), in the collapse of the Alliance for Progress in Latin america and in the ?blowback? from supporting various dictators and psychopaths, from Mubutu to Marcos. While Rostow?s car eer was blemished by Vietnam, it is perhaps true that his concern with the political pre conditions for take off now the term of art is ?governance? is more relevant than (NEW PARAGRAPH) ever. rL/mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Baran and Hobsbawm (1961); Keeble (1967). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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