Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

The Dictionary of Human Geography (210 page)

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
12.1Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
underdevelopment
A term used to signify a comparative absence of deveLopment, but which is now less commonly used by scholars (though it retains its popular, even populist force). It emerged as part of a postwar discourse on economic growth in the third worLd, where it functioned mainly as an adjectival noun. Underdevelopment here functioned mainly as a noun. modernization theorists grouped together a number of coun tries that they described as traditional or pre modern. These countries had not yet ?taken off? towards an era of high mass con sumption (see stages of growra). By the standards of the USA and other ?developed? countries, they suffered from underdevelop ment (Hoselitz, 1952). Underdevelopment here defined a linked set of states that included: being mainly agricultural or rural; being religious or even fatalistic in outlook, but definitely not scientific; being poorly served by roads, railways, schools and clinics; and being beset by high rates of population growth and poor environmental conditions. The Promethean ideoLogy of development was meant to change all this, including in underdeveloped socialist countries. aid and planning would be the handmaidens of the transition from a state of underdevelopment to a state of development. (NEW PARAGRAPH) We now see that many of the concerns expressed by modernization theorists in the 1950s and 1960s reflected the anxieties felt by US liberals (e.g. W.W. Rostow) and con servatives (e.g. Samuel Huntington) about economic and political development in post war America. There was particular concern about the strength of authority relations at a time of rapid social change. These concerns were allied to an extraordinary faith in the view that all countries would one day learn to be modern in the American way. Both Rostow (directly) and Huntington (indirectly) were (NEW PARAGRAPH) active in promoting the USA?s war in Vietnam in line with this secular faith. com munism was a deviant ideology that had to be defeated. peasants had to be pushed (or bombed) out of the countryside, where they were coming under the influence of the Vietcong (Gilman, 2003). Significantly, how ever, a sparky group of Latin American scholars in the 1960s strongly challenged the idea that underdevelopment should be defined as an adjectival noun. Andre Gunder Frank (1966) famously declared that while all coun tries had at some stage been undeveloped, only in the ?Third World? had some countries been made underdeveloped. Frank, in other words, moved to redefine underdevelopment as an active verb. In his view it described not an original state of virgin forests and wilder ness (see nature), but a grim landscape of impoverishment that had been created as part of the development of the capitalist world system. capitaLism, Frank suggested, created development and underdevelopment as two sides of the coin (see dependency theory). Arranging countries on a straight line from underdeveloped to developed made no sense. It ignored the active creation of their very different geographies by common processes of unequal exchange and uneven deveLopment. sco (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gilman (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
uneven development
The spatially and temporally uneven processes and outcomes (socio economic and physical) that are char acteristic of, and functional to, capitaLism. One of the most striking features of human geographies, particularly those activities and indicators conventionally labelled as ?eco nomic?, is their unevenness at every scale. This is evident in the organization of the global economy (e.g. the categories of First and third worLds, or core, peripheral and semi peripheral countries); at regional scales within most countries (e.g. heavily industrial ized or finance centred regions versus ?laggard? or persistently poor rural areas); within metropolitan areas (e.g. ?inner cities? versus suburbs); and within many cities at neigh bourhood and block by block scales. (NEW PARAGRAPH) neo cLassicaL economics typically regards such unevenness as temporary, and assumes or predicts that capitalist deveLopment (?eco nomic growth?) will produce movement tow ards equilibrium over space and time, leading to eventual convergence (cf. modernization). (NEW PARAGRAPH) By contrast, Marxist geography views such unevenness as actually produced by capitalism. Neil Smith, the leading geographical theorist of uneven development, emphasizes that it is not merely a reflection of a highly heteroge neous world in which perfect uniformity is always unlikely; nor is it even solely the result of the fact that it is useful to capitalists. Rather, it is an unavoidable consequence of cap italism as a mode of production, ?... the systematic geographical expression of the con tradictions inherent in the very constitution and structure of capital? (Smith, 1990, p. xiii). If true, this would mean that that ongoing capitalist development will not elim inate unevenness; rather, it will continually recreate it. Empirically, the historical geog raphy of capitalist modernity would seem to support the latter position. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Uneven development is central to the geog raphies of capitalism for several reasons. Capitalist firms and states arguably depend upon geographical unevenness to perform functions essential to the ongoing accumula tion of capital, such as displacing and ameli orating crisis tendencies (e.g. via the constant provision of new sites for investment) and dis ciplining workers or states (e.g. via threats to move jobs to lower wage locations, or punitive disinvestment). More fundamentally, though, capitalist production necessarily results in uneven development, whether or not particu lar capitalists intend, desire or benefit from it. This is because of the unavoidable tension between the need to invest capital in the built environment in relatively fixed and enduring ways in order to engage in production, and the need for capital to remain mobile in order to circulate as value and remain available for investment in new locations and industries with higher rates of profit. As Smith puts it, ?The spatial immobilization of capital in its material form is no more or less a necessity than the perpetual circulation of capital as value. Thus it is possible to see the uneven development of capitalism as the geographical expression of the more fundamental contra diction between use value and exchange value? (1990, p. xv). The concrete implications of this rather abstract formulation are that the process of development in a particular place is very likely to foster conditions that will make it a less attractive location for further invest ment in the not too distant future: wages and ground rents will rise, the workers concen trated there will have increased incentives and means to organize politically, and so on all meaning that the anticipated rate of profit on future investments there will compare unfavourably to that in less developed locations. Conversely, the consequences of underdevelopment often include conditions attractive to capital and conducive to high rates of profit: high unemployment, low wages and rents, states eager to co operate and more. Uneven development can thus be seen as the unity of the seemingly opposed, but intimately connected, processes of development and underdevelopment. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Perhaps the critical point regarding uneven development is that there is no reason to expect it to end: capital can move back and forth among places indefinitely in multiple rounds of investment, sequentially building up, aban doning and reinvesting in the same locations. Debates over such dynamics have been central to marxism (see Smith, 1990): Marx himself, as well as Rosa Luxemburg and others, sug gested at points that capitalist development depended on the continual incorporation of previously uncolonized areas, and that once that the global expansion of capitalism was complete, it would lead towards a homogenous landscape of capitalist development and the preconditions for international socialism. The end of colonial expansion failed to curtail the development of capitalism, though, calling such a vision into question and leading Lenin and Trotsky to recognize and theorize the evi dent fact that capitalism could develop via uneven development within areas already internal to capitalism. Underdevelopment came to be understood less as a condition of neglect or exclusion from the international capitalist economy, and more as something actively produced though inclusion in that economy, often on unfavourable terms. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Marxist geography tackled the question of uneven development anew in the 1980s and 1990s, with Harvey (1999 [1982], 2001) and Smith (1990, 1996b) in particular seeking to develop a systemic theory of the geographical dynamics of capitalist development, and they and others endeavouring to delineate more precisely how uneven development works in specific types of settings. Neil Smith has intro duced at least two arguments that have influ enced much subsequent research in geography. The first, developed with respect to older urban areas and gentrification, sug gested that a large rent gap could be identi fied as an underlying mechanism triggering switches between periods of disinvestment and reinvestment in urban areas (Smith, 1979c, 1996a). The second was that the ongoing production of nature under capitalism ensures that more and more of the non human world is transformed by the dynamics of capitalist uneven development (Smith, 1990). These concepts have informed much subsequent research attempting to trace how capital circulates through built and nat ural environments, constantly recreating and undermining distinctions such as urban versus rural or suburban (e.g. Henderson, 1999; Murdoch and Lowe, 2003; Darling, 2005). Related work on industrial location theory has explored industrial geographies in light of theories of uneven development theorizing, for instance, the ?windows of opportunity? for firms and sectors to dramatically change their geographies (Storper and Walker, 1989). jm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Harvey (2001); Smith (1990). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
universalism
The idea that defining charac teristics of phenomena, conceptual definitions or moral, aesthetic or epistemological truths hold for all times and places, transcending their immediate local circumstances (see epis temoLogy; moraL geographies). Such char acteristics, definitions and truths are made on the basis of wider practices and theoretical schemes, the justification for which is given by their universal starting point. Plato first made the distinction between universals and particulars. Universals are the general refer ents to which words such as ?redness? or ?goodness? or ?beauty? refer, whereas particu lars are their concrete instances; for example, the red serge jackets of Canadian Mounties, Mother Theresa or a Van Gogh painting. The postwar history of geography can be read as the history of the invocation of different uni versals. So, for example, those committed to human geography as spatiaL science appealed to the universals of quantitative methods and rationaL choice theory; marxist geography looked to the universal of value as defined by the Labour theory of vMue; and huMANistic geography to a univer sal humanism. Recent work in the humanities and social sciences, including human geog raphy, and going under the signs of postmod ernism, post structuraLism and post coLoniaLism, criticizes the use of universals, connecting their deployment to systemic power differentials around (for example) gen der, cLass and race. So, for example, the ?universal? subject of classical humanism turns out to have been bourgeois, male and European, but these markings were unre marked in the vocabulary of universalism to (NEW PARAGRAPH) which the ideoLogy appealed. Universals are thus another means by which oppression and domination are realized. tb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Tsing (2004, Introduction). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
urban and regional planning
The design and institution of specific policies and Laws to guide land use in metropoLitan areas (or sub areas), usually by or at the direction of governments. Urban and regional planning is inherently a spatial activity: the broad goal is to ?provide for a spatial structure of activities (or of land uses) which in some way is better than the pattern existing without planning? (Hall, 2002c [1975], p. 3). Planning involves predictive statistical analyses about future growth of population and economies, com bined with architectural and landscape blue prints (often in the form of land use and zoning maps) for the physical manifestation of such growth in space. Computer technology (especially geographic information systems) has transformed planning from blueprints for the future to a notion of ?a continuous series of controls over the development of [an] . . . area? (ibid., p. 12). (NEW PARAGRAPH) utopian ideals for the physical layout and social structure of cities and societies have existed for centuries (see utopia), but the creation of formal planning as a profession and activity in governance culminated from a series of separate yet interrelated political and social concerns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about public health and sanitation, crime, poverty and, in the USA, immigrant assimiLation (Hall, 2002b [1988]). It is rooted in the utopian ideals of modernism, and a faith in the capacity for scientific and technical reason to achieve the goals of order, coherence and regulation. In the twentieth century planning was institu tionalized at different scaLes of government (e.g. federal, state and municipal) to manage the growth and expansion of cities, especially in terms of land use and provision of infra structure (particularly transportation and utilities). Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford were instrumental in reconceptua lizing American and British urban or town planning into regional planning in the 1910s and 1920s. In the same period, zoning was established in the USA, enabling the land use controls that are essential to planning. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ebenezer Howard?s design for and realiza tion of his ?garden city? in Letchworth, England (between 1898 and 1903), was one of the first explicit attempts at urban and regional planning. One of his primary goals was to seek a balance between industry and nature, a goal shared with the parks move ment in the USA, particularly as advocated by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted (Jackson, 1985; Hall, 2002a [1988]). The ?City Beautiful? movement was another response against industrialization, but one that focused primarily on physical architecture rather than land use overall (Hall, 2002a (NEW PARAGRAPH) ). The architect Le Corbusier?s grandi ose visions were influential in the creation of entirely new cities in Brasilia, Brazil and Chandigarh, India (Hall, 2002a [1988]). (NEW PARAGRAPH) With the rise of neo LiberaLism, urban and regional planning is increasingly a pubLic pri vate partnership, with an emphasis in some countries on self help initiatives (Drakakis Smith, 1997). The impact of gLobaLization and competition among gLobaL cities also curtail the authority of planners working at the urban and regional scaLe. The ?pillars? of modernist planning have been ?crumbling? for at least three decades for other reasons as well (Sandercock, 2003, p. 2). Jane Jacobs (1961) leveled an early and highly influential critique and alternative. More recently, Leonie Sandercock (2003) has charted ?the life and death? of modern planning, outlining alterna tive progressive, democratic planning practices influenced by feminist, post colonial and post modern theory (See feminism, postmodern ism, post coLoniaLism). dgm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hall (2002a [1988]); Jacobs (1992 [1961]); Sandercock (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
12.1Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

I Was Waiting For You by Maxim Jakubowski
Too Hot for TV by Cheris Hodges
Hot Mess by Lynn Raye Harris
The Other Child by Charlotte Link
Sheik Down by Mia Watts
Ace in the Hole by J. R. Roberts
December by Phil Rickman
I Broke My Heart by Addie Warren