The Dictionary of Human Geography (4 page)

fertility rates (in some cases over 4 per cent per annum), rapid environ mental degradation (the two are seen to be organically linked) and what is widely held to be the extraordinarily bleak economic future in the short term for most African economies. AIDS, conversely, is of late twentieth century provenance, but its history has been, from its inception, linked (often falsely) to Africa. While the statistics are contested on virtually every front, work by geographers has begun to draw out the patterns and consequences of terrifyingly high rural and urban infection rates in the east and central African arc. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Whether the human geography of Africa has approached Edward Said?s goal to produce a geography of African historical experience remains an open question. What the most com pelling geographies of the 1980s and 1990s accomplished, nonetheless, was the addition of complexity to our understanding of African places and spaces (Hart, 2003; Moore, 2005). Since 2000, there is no question that Africa has gained a newfound international visibility. Driven in part by the debt question and the efforts of the likes of Bono, Gordon Brown in his time at the British Exchequer, the New Economic Partnership for Africa (NEPAD), and the so called anti gLobaLization move ment, Africa is now the focus of substantial global concern. The conjuncture of a number offorces have brought the continent to a sort of impasse: the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the limited success of the austerity and adjustment re forms, a continuing decline in their share of world trade and foreign direct investment, the failure to meet the 2005 Millennium Goals, and the rise of massive cities (mega cities) dominated by sLums. The Commission on Af rica (?Blair Report?) and the US Council of Foreign Relations Task Force on Africa Report both released in 2005 speak in quite different registers to the challenges that geo graphical scholarship and practice must speak to. The growing significance of Africa in US ?energy security?, in which the Gulf of Guinea figures so centrally, is one area in which the long standing interest of geographers in stra tegic resources will continue to develop. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cooper (2003); Ferguson (2006); Mamdani (1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ageing
The process of becoming chrono logically older, something affecting all lifeforms, but which in the social sciences becomes sig nificant to the study of human populations and their internal differentiation. popuLation geography reconstructs the age profiles of populations within areas, noting the relative sizes of different age cohorts, and examining the demographic transition ensuing if fertil ity and mortality rates both decline and prompt the overall ageing of a population. This latter phenomenon is an oft remarked feature of the more developed world, with implications such as the increasing tax burden placed on the working age cohort, allied to increasing needs for specialist social, health and personal services for the growing elderly cohort (e.g. Andrews and Phillips, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Other researchers directly tackle the worlds and experiences of older people. While the broad field of gerontology (the study of such people) has prioritized a ?medical model?, con centrating on the biological facts of ?senes cence? (reduced mobility, deteriorating sight etc.), social scientists looking to social geron tology increasingly favour a ?social model?, emphasizing instead society?s progressive withdrawal from and even exclusion of its older members (as in the Western orthodoxy of ?retiring? people at c. 60 70 years). The social model acknowledges ageism as discrim inatory ideas and practices directed at people solely because of their age, specifically when this is old age, the latter being influenced by negative portrayals involving ?impotency, ugli ness, mental decline, . . . uselessness, isol ation, poverty and depression? (Vincent, 1999, p. 141). Countering such ageism, it is argued that many societies historically and be yond the West respond respectfully to their elders, regarding them as sources of wisdom, balanced judgement and effective political leadership. Many older people shatter the stereotypes, moreover, and are healthy, active and able to lead lives that are personally ful filling and socially worthwhile. A tension nonetheless arises between the relative bleak ness of the social model (e.g. Vincent, 1999), stressing the iniquities pressing on elder life, and a vision of the ?freedoms' now enjoyed by many older people as consumers buying into a dizzying variety of cultural practices (e.g. Gilleard and Higgs, 2000). Much depends on other dimensions of social being, such as cLass, ethnicity and gender, which differen tially impact the life experiences of different elderly population segments, and there is also an emerging distinction between the ?younger old? and the ?older old? (the latter, 85 + years, now being seen as the real ?other' emblematic of old age: Gilleard and Higgs, 2000, pp. 198 9). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These issues have all figured in geographical scholarship on ageing and elderly people. While chiLdren have recently attracted concerted geographical research attention, parallel work on elderly people remains fragmented, lodged in different corners of sociaL, cuLturaL, eco nomic, popuLation and medicaL geographies and various studies of disabiLity. Some at tempts have been made to delineate an overall field of ?gerontological geography? (Golant, 1979; Warnes, 1990), and to examine the inter sections of ageism, other bases of identity and the socio spatial worlds of old age (Laws, 1993; Harper and Laws, 1995; Pain, Mowl and Talbot, 2000). More specific studies have considered: the migration patterns traced out by elderly people, notably to ?amenity destin ations' in coastal areas, rural ?idylls' and even purpose built ?retirement villages' (Rogers, 1992); the daily activity spaces of elderly people, including the possible diminishing of such spaces attendant on both increasing bod ily frailty and loss of social roles (Golant, 1984); the everyday environmental experience of elderly people in residential neighbour hoods, particularly those of the city, including the meanings and memories attaching to the (NEW PARAGRAPH) quite mundane, peopled, object filled places all around them (Rowles, 1978; Golant, (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; and the growth of ?nursing homes? of different kinds, with definite locational and internal spatial configurations, which can be critiqued as zones of exclusion, putting bound aries between dependent elderly people and the rest of the population (Rowles, 1979; Phillips, Vincent and Blacksell, 1988). cpp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Andrews and Phillips (2005); Golant (1984); Harper and Laws (1995); Rowles (1978). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
agent-based modelling
An approach to understanding decision making and its con sequences through simuLation models, which require substantial computing power. Agent based models recognize the interconnections and spatial dependencies among people and places: a large number of agents make de cisions that affect others who respond in a dynamic process, the outcomes of which can be identified and in geographical applica tions mapped (cf. game theory). The col lective outcomes may be unexpected, even when the individual agents' decision making criteria are fairly simple (cf. rationaL choice theory). Complex patterns ?emerge' from the interaction of a large number of simple de cisions, which is one of the hallmarks of the burgeoning science of complexity (Holland, 1995). In this sense, agent based modelling conceives of the world as being generated from the bottom up, in contrast to an earlier generation of models in the social sciences which were aggregative, working from the top down (as in gravity modeLs). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A classic agent based model of spatial pat terns and processes was developed by Schel ling's (1971) work on ethnic residential segregation. His agents were households that had preferences for the type ofneighbour hood in which they lived such as for whites that ?no more than half of their immediate neighbours should be black'. Individuals were randomly distributed across a chequer board representation of an urban environ ment, and those whose situation did not match their preferences sought moves to va cancies where the criteria were met. Schelling showed that the equilibrium solution would almost certainly be a greater level of segrega tion than expressed in the preferences for example, although whites would be content if their neighbourhoods were 50 per cent black, most of them would live in areas where whites were in a large majority. With increases in computing power much more complex models can be run, which continue to provide the somewhat counter intuitive result that segre gation is greater than people?s individual pref erences suggest (Fossett, 2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agent based modelling is widely used in the social sciences in, for example, modelling the spread of diseases (cf. EpiDEMioLogy), traffic generation, land use and land cover chANgE, the Diffusion of ideas, Migration, crowding in small spaces and inter firm com petition (see http://www.econ.iastate.edu/ tesfatsi/ace.htm). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Batty (2005); Testfatsion and Judd (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
agglomeration
The association of product ive activities in close proximity to one another. Agglomeration typically gives rise to external economies associated with the collective use of the iNFrastructurE of transportation, com munication facilities and other services. Historically, there has been a tendency for eco nomic activity to concentrate spatially, the large markets associated with metropolitan areas add ing to the external cost advantages. Agglomer ation also facilitates the rapid circulation of capital, commodities and labour. In some cir cumstances, decentralization may counter agglomerative tendencies; for example, if land costs and those associated with congestion in the central area are very high. (See also economies of scale; economies of scope.) dms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Malmberg (1996); Scott (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
aggregate travel model
A statement, often expressed as an equation, that predicts some aspect of travel (e.g. the number of trips or travel mode) for units (e.g. individuals or households) aggregated to small areas, often called ?traffic analysis zones?. The data are collected and analysed for these zones, obscur ing differences that may exist within zones and, because zones do not make travel de cisions, rendering impossible investigation of decision making processes underlying travel. For example, number of trips generated by a zone may be predicted as a function of the zone?s average household income and average number of vehicles per household. Aggregate travel models have been fundamental to trans portation planning since the 1950s. Sha (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hanson (1995, esp. chs 1,4,5,6). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
agrarian question
The forms in which cap italist relations transform the agrarian sector, and the political alliances, struggles and com promises that emerge around different trajec tories of agrarian change. The founding theoretical text in studies of the agrarian ques tion is Karl Kautsky?s The agrarian question, first published 1899 (but not translated into English until the 1980s). Kautsky?s focus on the agrarian question in western Europe rested on a striking paradox: agriculture (and the rural) came to assume a political gravity pre cisely at a moment when its weight in the economy was waning. Agriculture?s curious political and strategic significance was framed by two key processes: the first was the growth and integration of a world market in agricul tural commodities (especially staples) and the international competition that was its hand maiden; and the second was the birth and extension into the countryside of various forms of parliamentary democracy. International competition in grains was driven not only by the extension of the agricultural frontier in the USA, in Argentina, in Russia and in east ern Europe (what Kautsky called the ?col onies? and the ?Oriental despotisms?), but also by improvements in long distance ship ping, by changes in taste (e.g. from rye to wheat) and by the inability of domestic grain production to keep up with demand. As a consequence of massive new supplies, grain prices (and rents and profits) fell more or less steadily from the mid 1870s to 1896 (Konig, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . It was precisely during the last quarter of the nineteenth century when a series of protectionist and tariff policies in France (1885), Germany (1879) and elsewhere were implemented to insulate the farming sector. New World grain exports were but one expres sion of the headlong integration of world com modity and capital markets on a scale and with an intensity then without precedent and, some would suggest, unrivalled since that period. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kautsky then devoted much time to the Prussian Junkers and their efforts to protect their farm interests. But in reality the structure of protection only biased the composition of production in favour of grains (and rye in particular) grown on the East Elbian estates. Tariffs provided limited insulation in the pro tectionist countries, while the likes of England, The Netherlands and Denmark actually adopted free trade (Konig, 1994). Protection did not, and could not, save landlordism but was, rather, a limited buffer for a newly en franchised peasant agriculture threatened by the world market. The competition from overseas produce ushered in the first wave of agricultural protectionism, and in so doing established the foundations of the European ?farm problem?, whose political economic re percussions continue to resonate in the halls of the European Commission, the GATT/WTO and trade ministries around the world (Fennell, 1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The agrarian question was a product of a particular political economic conjuncture, but was made to speak to a number of key theoretical concerns that arose from Kautsky?s careful analysis of the consequences of the European farm crisis: falling prices, rents and profits coupled with global market integration and international competition. In brief, he discovered that: (i) there was no tendency for the size distribution of farms to change over time (capitalist enterprises were not simply displacing peasant farms indeed, German statistics showed that middle peasants were increasing their command of the cultivated area); (ii) technical efficiency is not a precon dition for survivorship (but self exploitation might be); and (iii) changes driven by compe tition and market integration did transform agriculture, but largely by shaping the produc tion mix of different enterprises, and by deepening debt burdens and patterns of out migration rather than by radically recon figuring the size distribution of farms. The crisis of European peasants and landlords in the late nineteenth century was ?resolved? by intensification (cattle and dairying in par ticular in a new ecological complex) and by the appropriation of some farming functions by capital in processing and agro industry (see also Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson, 1987: see also agro foodsystem). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kautsky concluded that industry was the motor of agricultural development or, more properly, agro industrial capital was but that the peculiarities of agriculture, its biological character and rhythms (see Mann, 1990; Wells, 1996), coupled with the capacity for family farms to survive through self exploitation (i.e. working longer and harder in effect to depress ?wage levels?), might hinder some tendencies; namely, the development of classical agrarian capitalism. Indeed, agro industry which Kautsky saw in the increasing application of science, technology, and capital to the food processing, farm input and farm finance systems might prefer a non capitalist farm sector. In all of these respects whether his observations on land and part time farm ing, of the folly of land redistribution, his com mentary on international competition and its consequences, or on the means by which industry does or does not take hold of land based production Kautsky?s book was remarkably forward looking and prescient. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Terry Byres (1996) has suggested that there are three agrarian questions. The first, posed by Engels, refers to the politics of the agrarian transition in which peasants constitute the dominant class: What, in other words, are the politics of the development of agrarian capit ausm? The second is about production and the ways in which market competition drives the forces ofproduction towards increased yields (in short, surplus creation on the land). And the third speaks to accumuLation and the flows of sur plus, and specifically inter sectoral linkages be tween agriculture and manufacture. The latter Byres calls ?agrarian transition?, a term that embraces a number of key moments; namely, growth, terms of trade, demand for agrarian products, proletarianization, surplus appropri ation and surplus transfer. Byres is concerned to show that agriculture can contribute to in dustry without the first two senses of the agrar ian question being, as it were, activated, and to assert the multiplicity of agrarian transitions (the diversity of ways in which agriculture con tributes to capitalist industriaLization with or without ?full? development of capitalism in the countryside). While Byres? approach has much to offer, it suffers from a peculiar narrowness. On the one hand, it is focused on the internal dynamics of change at the expense of what we now refer to as gLobaLization. On the other, the agrarian question for Byres is something that can be ?resolved? (see also Bernstein, 1996). ?Resolved? seems to imply that once capitalism in agriculture has ?ma tured?, or if capitalist industrialization can pro ceed without agrarian capitalism (?the social formation is dominated by industry and the urban bourgeoisie?), then the agrarian ques tion is somehow dead. This seems curious on a number of counts, not the least of which is that the three senses of the agrarian question are constantly renewed by the contradictory and uneven deveLopment of capitalism itself. It is for this reason that we return to Kautsky, since his analysis embraces all three dimensions of the agrarian question (something seemingly not acknowledged by Byres) and because he focused so clearly on substantive issues central to the current landscape of agro food sys tems: globalization, vertical integration, the importance of biology in food provisioning, the application of science, the shifts of power off farm, the intensification of land based activities and the new dynamisms associated with agro processing (McMichael, 1996; Goodman and Watts, 1997). Of course, Kautsky could not have predicted the molecu lar revolution and its implications for the role of intellectual property rights and so on. But it is an engagement with his work that remains so central to current studies of modern agriculture. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The role of sociaLism also stands in some tension to the agrarian question. After 1917, Russian theoreticians ofrather different stripes for example, Chayanov and Preobrazhensky posited a type of socialist agrarian question in which peasants were collectivized into either state farms or co operatives (Viola, 1996), sometimes in practice through extraordinary violence and compulsion. There were very different experiences across the socialist world as regards the means by which socialist agricultural surpluses were generated and ap propriated by the state (here, for example, the Soviet Union and China are quite different). In the same way, the fall of actually existing socialisms after 1989 produced a circumstance in which a new sort of agrarian question emerged as agrarian socialism was decollecti vized in the Chinese case, for example, grad ually producing, after 1978, several hundred million peasants (Zweig, 1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kautsky was, of course, writing towards the close of an era of protracted crisis for European agriculture, roughly a quarter of a century after the incorporation of New World agriculture frontiers into the world grain market had provoked the great agrarian de pressions of the 1870s and 1880s. A century later, during a period in which farming and transportation technologies, diet and agricul tural commodity markets are all in flux, the questions of competition, shifting terms of trade for agriculture and subsidies remain politically central in the debates over the Euro pean Union, GATT and the neo LiberaL re forms currently sweeping through the tHird worLd. Like the 1870s and 1880s, the current phase of agricultural restructuring in the periphery is also marked (sometimes exagger atedly so) by a phase of ?democratization' (Kohli, 1994; Fox, 1995: cf. core peripHery model). Agrarian parallels at the ?centre' can be found in agriculture's reluctant initiation into the GATT/WTO trade liberalization agreement, albeit with a welter of safeguards and, relatedly, the dogged rearguard action being fought by western European farmers against further attempts to renegotiate the postwar agricultural settlement, which reached its protectionist apotheosis in the Common (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agricultural Policy (CAP) during the 1980s. It is a picture clouded, however, by the strange bedfellows that the CAP has joined in opposi tion, including environmentalists, food safety activists, animal liberationists, bird watchers, rural preservationists and neo conservative free trade marketeers all of which is to say that if agrarian restructuring has taken on global dimensions, it is riddled with uneven ness and inequalities (and here claims that the agrarian question is ?dead' appear rather curi ous). The rules of the game may be changing, but the WTO playing field is tilted heavily in favour of the OECD sponsors of this neo liberal spectacle. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bobrow Strain (2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH)