Showing papers in "Geographical Review in 1984"

Cities, Poverty, and Development: Urbanization in the Third World

Abstract: Gilbert and Gugler have produced a volume that explains and interprets the Third World urbanization process. The book's subject is vital in that approximately 80 percent of humanity resides in parts of the globe often discounted as \"out there\"-that is, they live in the South. Although the proportion of the population living in urban places in these underdeveloped areas is half that of the North, the pace of growth of such cities surpasses that in countries in the northern world by a factor of four or five. Indeed, the rankings of city sizes are increasingly dominated by southern examples. The world city is not just epitomized by such places as London, New York, and Toronto; Mexico City, Beijing, and Sao Paulo also must be considered. This second edition of Gties, Poverty and Development is much more than a slightly revised version of an outdated text; it is a sophisticated, synthetic account of the rapid transformation taking place in Third World urban centres. It makes most of the standard texts on the city and urbanization appear naive in that the Third World city is much more than a mere mirror of the First World's urbanization process. Southern cities are \"shaped\" by quite different forces. They are new and occupied by people caught up in the transition between peasant and proletariat, between lives shaped by cultural wholes in rural areas and lives pursued in autonomous, individualistic urban places, often charac­ terized by alienation and poverty. The Third World city is dominated by lacks: lack of economic growth, lack of social services, lack of infras­ tructure, and lack of development. These cities are located within Third World nations which were peripheralized and underdeveloped in the past at the hands of imperialism and colonialism, and today they continue to be peripheral parts of the global economy because of trade and the workings of the economic system. In an introduction and eight subsequent chapters the reader learns more about the unevenness of the First and Third worlds and how urbanization is differentiated in a world system. The book also considers the pattern and causes of disparities, the migration system

Geophagy in Central America.

Abstract: GEOPHAGY, or earth eating, is a nearly universal, transcultural phenomenon. The custom is a complex, multicausal behavior with roots in spiritual and religious beliefs, ritual oaths and ceremonies, medicinal practice, and perhaps nutritional need. Clay may be eaten to reduce abdominal pain caused by hookworm, to ease the pangs of hunger, to soothe heartburn and nausea, or simply to satisfy a craving because the soil tastes good.1 The most common manifestation of geophagy is clay eating during pregnancy. Because pregnancy exerts a strict physiological cost in terms of calcium, iron, and other minerals that must be delivered to the growing fetus, many of the so-called cravings during pregnancy and the resultant increase in eating may be a behavioral response to a physiological need. The purpose of this study is to ascertain the nutritional utility, if any, of a clay tablet that is eaten by pregnant Black Caribs, also known as Garifuna, in Belize. The tablet originates as a commercial trade item from neighboring Guatemala in association with the Christian cult of the Black Christ.

Continuity and Discontinuity

Abstract: LAST year continuity and discontinuity were much on my mind. As has been a habit of mine, I transposed the personal problem with its inevitable ambiguities onto the bright-lit stage of an impersonal question. Why make another move? Why cut the roots that one has established, perhaps for the first time in one's life? One answer is that I have always felt that being in place-being rooted-is an illusion. I have always been haunted by the idea of departure both of the glad, self-initiated and of the wrenching, unwilling kind. We are all more or less aware of a final departure that awaits us, but we are less aware of it when we are in the presence of friends and good books and are comforted by their projection of continuity and of reverberating meaning. When we glance at newspaper headlines or look about us beyond the privileged islands of stability, we may well be overcome by a sense of happenstance and finitude. I will return to the topic of happenstance and finitude near the end of this essay, for the main thrust here is to explore in a general way questions of continuity and discontinuity, linkage and disjunction as instances of how we think and, subsidiarily, as aspects of reality. I provide an academic setting for the personal question with which I opened this essay and with which I shall end it.

The sight and soul of sophiatown

Abstract: URBAN slums have been studied by social scientists for a long time. The detached, quantitative approaches of these investigators typically depict slums in pathological metaphors with data from censuses, institutional records, interviews, and, occasionally, participant observation.l Experiential approaches tend to portray slums as more enigmatic places than they seem to be in the social science literature. In contrast with the external viewpoint, a slum becomes a place where a number of basic human demands can be fulfilled.2 For Sophiatown, a mixed-race suburb of Johannesburg, which was demolished in the late 1950s, novels, autobiographies, short stories, and essays reveal the human aspects better than any other sort of record. Several prominent South African authors lived in or visited Sophiatown and wrote about the place. This literature allows investigation of the subjective dimensions of a legendary South African slum as well as promotes appreciation of the objective characteristics of Sophiatown. A great deal of this literature is protest writing, fashioned during a period of increased racial repression, which manifested itself, in part, in the destruction of Sophiatown. This genre of literature contained, for the first time on any scale, work about black urbanism by blacks themselves. Relying heavily on the precedent of the Harlem Renaissance school in the United States, the South African authors wrote in a caustic, piquant style about everyday affairs which they interpreted to be preoccupying. Charges of embittered partisanship and willful misrepresentation by the writers are readily wrung from these contextual observations. To rebut this hasty judgment, it may be pointed out that the consistent allusion by several authors to both the good and the bad in Sophiatown indicates that impressions were not entirely idiosyncratic. Critics may retort with accusations of conspiratorial exaggeration or even joint delusion among the nostalgic and, in some cases, exiled literati. One way of deciding the validity of the literature as a statement of objective realities in Sophiatown is to ponder its official reception. The outspoken commentary was not lightly dismissed. Much of the literature cited in this article has been banned by South African censors from local circulation and citation.

Political Violence and Urban Geography in Kingston, Jamaica

Abstract: be written. Those exciting years included both an attempt to direct the country toward a socialist path in the Cuban-Soviet orbit and a populist response and reaction. The purpose of this article is to highlight a number of spatially significant factors that should be included and duly weighed in a meaningful assessment of that eventful period in Jamaican history. A battle-scarred space-time framework is perhaps more suited to committed combatants than to academics. However, my qualifications for this analysis are enhanced by personal involvement and identification with the specific locale whose yards and lanes I have known intimately for a quarter of a century. The specific locale of this study is a two-square-kilometer section of ghetto in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. The area had approximately 55,000 residents in 1976 but only 32,000 in 1982 (Fig. 1). The most outstanding characteristic of the area is its spatial division in two hitherto irreconcilable territories: one giving allegiance to the Peoples' National Party (PNP), which ruled the country from 1976 to 1980, and the other to the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), which has governed since October, 1980. Variously named Dead Man's Gulch, No Man's Land, and the Berlin Wall, a very real frontier between the two territories zigzags through the most densely populated section of Kingston. Few individuals-some politicians excepted-would be rash enough to risk crossing this frontier anywhere between the main arteries of Maxfield Avenue to the west and Slipe Pen Road to the east, although a city map indicates that twenty streets traverse the divide. Each of these streets has a visible "no-pass" point like a wrecked automobile, a pile of logs, a group of burned buildings, or a strip of waist-high grass in the middle of the roadway. Polarization is total. The study area is called a ghetto by its inhabitants and the media. A visitor would quickly use a stereotypic description of the area with its old, decrepit, and rat-infested structures, teeming populations, pollution, crime, and a generally "unmiddle-class environment."' According to the usual criteria of geographers, the area is undoubtedly a slum: a stressful environment with crowded, dilapidated structures, pathological behavior, and fragmentation by blocks.2 The burden of political and social conflict inevitably falls

Mexican American exterior murals.

Abstract: M URAL art became popular in the United States during the great depression, when wall paintings, sponsored by the Federal Arts Program of the WPA, were executed in public buildings across the land.1 Currently mural art has become important on exterior walls of buildings and thus is part of an evolving pattern of street art.2 This essay focuses on these murals as an element of the built environment that lends insight to cultural heritage, preferences, and change in a community. Exterior murals are now distinctive features in many urban landscapes, particularly in Mexican American districts of many cities. Here mural art is not only an artifact that embellishes the barrio landscape but also a vehicle for political and social expressions.3 Art and landscape are not new themes for geographers, but their emphasis has been on traditional art forms like canvas painting. A focus on less traditional forms like exterior murals presents several challenges not usually encountered in conventional studies of landscape art. Mexican American, or Chicano, mural art is relatively recent and not well documented in traditional sources. Much of the data presented here were collected in the field and through interviews with artists and art historians. Because these murals are part of the everyday landscape, they are exposed to the elements and can be ephemeral. Dating murals and ascribing artistry are not always easy tasks. Many early street murals and some recent ones have no date of execution or information about the artists. Whenever the

Carbon Dioxide: Current Views and Developments in Energy/Climate Research

Abstract: The International School of Climatology of the \"Ettore Majo rana Centre for Scientific Culture\" at Erice was founded in 1979, with the aim of organising advanced courses and highly specialized seminars on current problems in the field of climatology. The first course, in March 1980, was devoted to climatic varia tions and variability, the understanding of which lies at the roots of modern climatological research. The publicity given to recent extremes of climate, which have had serious consequences for local populations, has led to an increased awareness of the practical importance of researching the causes and nature of climatic changes on all temporal and spatial scales. In recent decades it has become apparent that man himself is capable, mostly through industrial and agricultural activities, of causing climatic perturbations on both the local and global scales. Although these influences are as yet difficult to detect, it is clear that increasing release of C02 through the expanding use of fossil fuels for energy production is one activity that could lead to significant climatic change. Indeed, by this means, energy use has the potential of being the major influence on climate over the next century, so the choice of this aspect of climate-ener gy interactions as the topic of the Second Course of the Interna tional School of Climatology was an obvious one. It took place from 16 - 26 July, 1982.\

Cartographic Strategies for Airline Advertising

Abstract: N EITHER the logic of ancient Greek philosophers nor the certainties of modern science have permanently dispelled illusions of a flat earth.1 Mental pictures of the earth easily lapse to two dimensions and then acquire the various biases of flat maps that must distort certain spatial properties so as to preserve others. Shape, size, and directions are the properties most commonly involved. In the 1940s a global war and the then new era of long-range air flight required fresh perspectives on continental relationships. J. P. Van Zandt, writing in 1944, deplored the overexposure to world maps on the Mercator projection whose "grotesque distortions have colored our international thinking."2 He proposed a base map that would show global air-traffic patterns on an azimuthal projection centered somewhere in France and that would circumscribe what he termed the Principal Hemisphere.3 A decade later, K. R. Sealy used this same hemispheric image in his study of air-transportation patterns.4 Other scholars noted that azimuthal projections have embedded distortions so that a change of projection means an exchange of one set of objections for another.5 Despite exposure to an ever-widening variety of projections and sophisticated graphic techniques, the mind lapses easily and instinctively to a twodimensional picture, shaped by what has been seen in the field and on flat maps. A cartographer can either use these preconceptions or try to change them, whichever approach better conveys the intended geographical message. In this article I explore the ways that advertisements for airlines present geographic fact either by relying on familiar Mercatorlike imagery or by attempting to alter mental maps of the world. I have extracted the visual and verbal geographies from several prominent advertisements to illustrate and to evaluate the methods of delivering spatial information. Two assumptions govern my analysis. Firstly, I assume that viewers of these advertisements have mental biases that derive from habitual exposure

Intraurban migration in West German cities

Abstract: This study is concerned with the problems posed by the increasing tendency of immigrants to become permanent residents in the larger cities of the Federal Republic of Germany. It focuses on an analysis of intra-neighborhood movements of West Germans and immigrants in Duisburg and Dusseldorf. Consideration is given to the level of segregation the distance of immigrant moves the effect of neighborhood quality on migration the level of replacement of Germans by immigrants and the spatial distribution of immigrant communities. The results suggest that despite the difficulties encountered by immigrants in their attempts at assimilation the level of segregation in urban areas is low. The reasons for this such as housing shortages are discussed.

Malaria in Bangladesh.

Abstract: M4ALARIA is a complex disease that requires an association of three factors-parasite, vector, and host-to continue its life cycle. The physical and cultural environments in Bangladesh permit the survival of at least two malarial parasites, Plasmodium malariae and Plasmodium falciparum, and three vectors, A. philippinesis, A. sundaicus, and A. minimus, during most of the year.' Bangladesh is considered a malaria-endemic area, and some parts of the country have been designated as hyperendemic.2 Before the introduction of the Malaria Eradication Program (MEP) in 1961, the disease was so widespread that it accounted annually for 15 percent of the total deaths in Bangladesh.3 The annual incidence of malaria has been greatly reduced by MEP.4 Although uniform data are not available for the early years of the program, governmental documents published in the late 1960s reported a remarkable decrease in the number of malaria cases after the institution of MEP.5 The decline was particularly striking for the years 1968 to 1971 (Fig. 1). The incidence of malaria dropped from 10.8 per 100,000 population in 1968 to 4.22 per 100,000 in 1971. A reverse trend marked the period 1972-1977, which was characterized by a rise from the 4.22 per 100,000 in 1971 to 25.40 in 1972. A slight drop in the rate occurred in 1973, but it rose to a peak of 60.44 in 1976.6 The drop to 35.87 the following year did not necessarily indicate the beginning of a downward trend in the number of reported cases of malaria, because the two-year plan which was implemented in 1978 did not allocate funds for the MEP. In a subsequent five-year plan for 1980-1985, the program received 6 percent of the total health budget.7 The incidence of malaria in Bangladesh was much higher in the years 1972-1977, which I term hereafter the resurgence period, than in the years

Planning for tourism in Belize.

Abstract: T OURISM has emerged as a significant economic and social activity in many parts of the world during the past two decades. Geographical research on tourism has been wide-ranging, but focused on existent patterns, processes, and effects.1 Preparation of development plans for tourism has been largely the responsibility of professional planners, economists, marketing consultants, and architects. The input from geographers has been meager, although there is considerable scope for contributions from them, especially in resource evaluation and site selection and development.2 Indeed the absence of a spatial perspective, which geographers could supply, has been a factor in the failure of some tourism planning.3 This assertion does not suggest that all tourism plans have lacked a spatial perspective or that effective evaluation or site-selection procedures have not been devised.4 The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the contribution of geographers in tourism planning by describing the preparation of a tourism-development program for Belize. Belize is a newly independent country on the Caribbean coast of Central America (Fig. 1). Bounded on the north by the Mexican state of Quintana Roo and on the south and west by Guatemala, Belize has an area of 22,965 square kilometers. The 1980 census recorded a total population of 145,000, almost one-third of which was concentrated in Belize City. Other concentrations were Belmopan, the capital, and the district centers of Corozal, Orange Walk, San Ignacio, Dangriga, and Punta Gorda. The population comprises diverse groups of people, with the main ones being creoles, Gar-

Trends in California Viticulture

Abstract: VITICULTURE has been a component in California agriculture for more than two centuries. Regional viticultural associations in the state have responded to the changing fortunes, consumer habits, and socioeconomic circumstances. Geographical analyses of the ever-changing patterns of viticulture in the state have been minimal, although "viticulture undoubtedly is the most geographically expressive of all agricultural industries."' The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of changes primarily since 1970 in the geography of viticulture in California. The focus is on the principal responses to the steadily rising demand for California wines. Sweeping geographical changes have occurred in a search for sites for new vineyards to produce more and better wine grapes. Production of wine has expanded in traditional grape-growing areas, and new areas have been brought into production.2 These changes have led to the designation of official viticultural areas. Primarily shaped by topography and proximity to the Pacific Ocean, the changing pattern of viticulture in California can best be understood by examination of the shifting distributions of selected varieties of premium grapes. Two native species of grapes grow in California, but viticulture is associated with imported European varieties. Viticulture began in the second half of the eighteenth century when Spanish missionaries from Mexico introduced a variety of Vitis vinifera, popularly known now as the mission grape, to make wine for their communion rites. The industry that resulted from this introduction grew erratically during the next two centuries. The current upswing in California viticulture began in the 1960s, although the greatest changes have occurred since 1970. Of primary importance in the recent history of California viticulture was the opening of a winery by Robert Mondavi near Oakville in the Napa Valley (Fig. 1). This winery represented the first important commercial use of technological innovations that had revolutionized wine making since the mid-1960s. A primary change was the use of stainless steel containers for fermentation together with temperature control during the process, especially for white wines (Fig. 2). Slow, cool fermentation maintains fruitiness in white wines as well as other types like blanc de noir that have become very popular in California. These innovations diffused quickly to wine-making regions in Europe, Australia, and

Land-development policy in South Korea.

Abstract: Between 1950 and 1980 South Korea has changed from a predominantly rural to an urbanized society. Highly concentrated urbanization around Seoul in the 1950s and 1960s created sevre economic and social disparities between the capital and other parts of the country. During the 1970s the central government recognized the need for more balanced patterns of urbanization and economic development and instituted comprehensive development plans. The policies aimed at reducing the pace of rural to urban migration slowing the population growth rate of Seoul and creating a balanced pattern of regional and urban development. Strategies for achieving these goals included the improvement of the living environment and services in secondary and intermediate cities the designation of intermediate-sized cities as growth centers to receive investments of social services and infrastructure regulations on land development in Seoul and other metropolitan areas and for the deconcentration of industry from metropolitan areas and for the creation of new industry in other cities. Despite plementation problems the central government has successfully slowed Seouls growth rate and changed the pattern of urbanization in South Korea. While a bias towards Seoul persists its share of the urban population declined from 43% in 1971 to 39% in 1980. Seouls growth rate dropped from 55% between 1960 and 1965 to 21% between 1975 and 1980. Thirteen of the countrys 20 largest cities grew faster than Seoul from 1970 to 1980 while the economy and urban structure of the intermediate cities has changed dramatically with manufacturing dominating employment. The current comprehensive development plan will seek to reinforce these trends.