Showing papers in "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 1995"

Geographies of financial exclusion: financial abandonment in Britain and the United States

Abstract: Financial exclusion refers to those processes that prevent poor and disadvantaged social groups from gaining access to the financial system. It has important implications for uneven development because it amplifies geographical differences in levels of income and economic development. In recent years the financial-services industry in the United States and in Britain has become increasingly exclusionary in response to a financial crisis founded in higher levels of competition and extreme levels of indebtedness. The processes of financial exclusion are documented. An alternative agenda to foster resistance and help construct institutional alternatives of benefit to low-income communities currently being excluded by the financial system is formulated. Resistance to financial exclusion and the building of an alternative financial infrastructure will be significantly enhanced if the processes of exclusion are considered in the context of a notion of 'financial citizenship'.

The compact city and transport energy consumption

Abstract: This paper challenges an emerging conventional wisdom: that transport energy consumption, and hence pollution, can be substantially reduced by promoting more compact cities. Such reasoning has quickly found its way from academic studies to official policy in many countries. Do the likely savings from such containment warrant the required draconian policies? An empirical assessment of transport energy consumption arising from decentralization is used to address this question. Two contextual reviews of the compact city case and the strength of decentralization precede the assessment. The conclusion is that energy savings will be minimal and that other policies might be more fruitful.

There's no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography

Abstract: The reconceptualization of 'culture' in the 'new cultural geography' has been important for turning attention to processes, politics and interrelationships with other 'spheres' of social life. But for all the important theoretical and empirical advances this reconceptualization has induced, cultural geography still reifies 'culture' and assigns it an ontological and explanatory status. In this paper I argue that such a reification is a fallacy and that cultural geography would be better served by following the 'new cultural geography' to its logical conclusion: a recognition that there is no such (ontological) thing as culture. I argue instead for a focus on the material development of the idea (or ideology) of culture. Such a further reconceptualization of the object of study in cultural geography may be undertaken in many ways but, by way of example, in this paper I suggest only one: how the idea of culture functions within systems of production and reproduction in the contemporary city. Through this example and the discussion that precedes it, I show that the recognition that there is no such thing as culture allows us better to theorize the workings of power in systems of social reproduction.

The Spatialization of Politics: Local and National Actor-Spaces in Environmental Conflict

Abstract: Political practice is still not adequately integrated into the geographical study of economic and social change a point illustrated here by reference to the localities debate in which a central tension is evident between structural determination and contingency in socio-spatial relations. However, localities have recently been considered as constituted by networks of relations operating over various spatial scales. This approach requires attention to the ways in which actors in local situations are tied into wider sets of relations. A perspective derived from micro-sociology is introduced to facilitate the analysis of the links, or associations, between actors-in-situations, or actor-spaces. A case study illustrating how such an approach can make sense of political action at both 'national' and 'local' levels is examined. The study of an environmental conflict around minerals development shows that in practice the local and the national become 'mixed up' as actors build associations in pursuit of their goals. It is concluded that the practices of association between actor-spaces leave 'layers' of outcomes in places which contribute to patterns of regional development.

The place of music

Abstract: The global music industry - contradictions in the commodification of the sublime, John Lovering the early days of the gramophone industry in India - historical, social, and musical perspectives, Gerry Farrell welcome to Dreamsville - a history and geography of Northern Soul, Joanne Hollows and Katie Milestone Victoria brass bands - class, taste, and space, Trevor Herbert locating listening - technological space, popular music, and Canadian Mediation, Jody Berland Borderlines - bilingual terrain in Scottish song, Steve Sweeney Turner England's glory - sensibility of place in English music, 1900-1950, Robert Stradling Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's geography of disappointment - hybridity, identity, and networks of musical meaning, George Revill global undergrounds - the cultural politics of sound and light in Los Angeles, 1965-1975, Simon Rycroft from dust strom disaster to pastures of glory - Woody Guthrie and the landscapes of the dust bowl odyssey, John Gold sounding out of the city - music and the sensuous production of place, Sara Cohen desire, power, and the sonoric landscape - early modernism and the politics of musical privacy, Richard Leppert.

Sounding out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place

Abstract: The relationship between music and place is explored through biographical information on one particular individual and his social activities and networks in the city of Liverpool. Music plays a role in producing place as a material setting comprising the physical and built environment; as a setting for everyday social relations, practices and interactions; and as a concept or symbol that is represented or interpreted. This production of place through music is shown to be a contested and ideological process, whilst the dynamic interrelationship between music and place suggests that music plays a very particular and sensual role.

Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo : at the frontiers of 'human' geography

Abstract: This paper develops a cultural critique of the zoo as an institution that inscribes various human strategies for domesticating, mythologizing and aestheticizing the animal universe. Using the case of Adelaide, South Australia, the paper charts the mutable discursive frames and practices through which animals were fashioned and delivered to the South Australian public by the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia. The visual technologies at the Adelaide Zoo are documented from the time of menagerie-style caging in the late nineteenth century, through the era of the Fairground between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, up to the contemporary era of naturalistic enclosures when exhibits such as the fanciful World of Primates continue to craft the means for the human experience of nature. Woven into the story are more general themes concerning the construction of nature under colonialism, the gendered and racialized underpinnings of ‘human’ boundary-making practices in relation to ‘non-human’ animals and that form of power and possession known as domestication.

Masculinity, dualisms and high technology

Abstract: spaces One way of beginning to conceptualize the difference between these two kinds of spaces is through the work of Henri Lefebvre. In his account of The production of space (1991), he characterizes the space of current western society as 'abstract space' and discusses (and criticizes), as one of its defining features, its fragmentation, its division into subspaces devoted to the performance of specialized activities. His historical analysis explains this process as the result of aspects both of modernity and capitalism on the one hand and of currently dominant forms of masculinity on the other. Although Lefebvre's historical account and the supposed newness of abstract spaces may be questioned, his examples of such specialized and fragmented spaces/ space-times resemble very strongly the specialized space-times constructed in high-tech workplaces. They seem to have many of the characteristics of abstract space: they are demarcated against an outside, they are specialized, they are masculine. Yet, in the story we are telling here, they are not coexisting with other similarly specialized and sealed-off time-spaces but with a time-space that This content downloaded from 157.55.39.244 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 05:27:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Masculinity, dualisms and high technology 495 of the domestic sphere which is porous, which allows entry from other spheres, which is perhaps, in Lefebvre's terms, characteristic of an older and yet, possibly at the same time, a more potentially progressive kind of time-space. Lloyd (1984, 50), it might be recalled, contrasted the wholly rational sphere of reason/transcendence (i.e. evacuated of other things) with 'woman's task' of preserving 'the sphere of the intermingling of mind and body' (my emphasis). Further, Lefebvre (1991, 191) pointedly asks Is not social space always, and simultaneously, both a field of action (offering its extension to the deployment of projects and practical intentions) and a basis of action (a set of places whence energies derive and whither energies are directed). In other words, social space is both an arena of action and potentially enabling/productive of further effects. Just so the places of work in these high-tech parts of the economy: they are not merely spaces where things may happen but spaces which, in the nature of their construction (as specialized, as closed-off from intrusion, and in the nature of the things in which they are specialized), have effects in the structuring of the daily lives and the identities of the scientists who work within them. Most particularly, in their boundedness and in their dedication to abstract thought to the exclusion of other things, these workplaces both reflect and provide a material basis for the particular form of masculinity which hegemonizes this form of employment. Not only the nature of the work and the culture of the workplace but also the construction of the space of work itself, therefore, contributes to the moulding and reinforcement of this masculinity. As Lefebvre (1991, 89) writes: The dominant tendency fragments space and cuts it up into pieces ... Specializations divide space among them and act upon its truncated parts, setting up mental barriers and practico-social frontiers. Lefebvre would argue that the currently dominant tendency towards the homogenization/ fragmentation and specialization of space is something which should be opposed. This relates to the second stage in the argument here about what is happening to the work/home boundary among the scientists of the Cambridge phenomenon. For what has been discussed so far is an alteration in the boundary between home and work which consists of nothing more than the spatio-temporal transgression by one sphere (one side of the dualism) into the other. As has been noted, this transgression is all one way but the second stage of the argument is that in whatever manner one interprets this 'blurring' of boundaries, it does not overcome the dualism itself. Yet it is the fact of the dichotomies (reason/non-reason; transcendence/immanence) which has been criticized as being part of that same mode of thinking which also polarizes genders and the characteristics so frequently ascribed to them. And it is the parallel fragmentation/specialization which came in for criticism from Lefebvre. What, then, can be learned about the possibility of unification from this study of Cambridge scientists?

Concepts of equity, fairness and justice in geographical studies

Abstract: Notions of equity, fairness and justice frequently appear in geographical writing. It may be argued that eight distinct concepts underlie this usage, all of which are relevant to the study of geographical distributions. Such applications introduce complications in terms of measurement (due to problems of geographical data-collection units and ecological correlations). The common geographical operationalization of spatial equality, territorial justice and minimum standards can be related to the underlying concepts. Differences in the use of the concepts may also be an element in regional description and comparison.

Sunk costs: a framework for economic geography

Abstract: A framework for research on corporate strategy and restructuring in economic geography which focuses explicitly upon the role of sunk costs is proposed. The management of sunk costs in contrasting 'domains of competition' is discussed, and fifteen analytical propositions about the economic and spatial logic of sunk costs are outlined. Claims are advanced that the logic of sunk costs can accommodate both spatial fixity and spatial plasticity and can help bridge the separate, apparently distinctive, notions of restructuring and post-Fordism. Illustrative examples are drawn from both the manufacturing and service sectors. The regional effects of alternative corporate strategies with respect to sunk costs and an assessment of the increasing significance of new financial instruments designed to liberate firms from the history and geography of production are outlined. The conclusion sets out a comparative evaluation of sunk costs and transaction costs as heuristic frameworks in economic geography.

Between the Book and the Lamp: Imaginative Geographies of Egypt, 1849-50

Abstract: This essay compares the imaginative geographies of Egypt produced by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert as they travelled up the Nile Valley and back to Cairo in 1849-50. Their experiences are used to emphasize the physicality (rather than merely the textuality) of travel writing. The differences between their imaginative geographies and in particular between their representations of landscape, space and people, illuminate the complex and fractured formation of Orientalism as a constellation of power, knowledge and spatiality, and its entanglements with patriarchy, sexuality and various colonialisms.

Changing Understandings of African Pastoralism and the Nature of Environmental Paradigms

Abstract: The recent debate about the sustainability of African pastoralism is taken to illustrate four general issues in environmental management: (i) the extent to which the institutionalization of environmental paradigms has made them conform to the Kuhnian model; (ii) the intimate link between environmental policies and paradigms; (iii) the need to understand the dialogue between scientists, policy-makers and educators and the environment; and (iv) the theoretical and practical weakness of an environmental science that does not rest on a dialogue with cultural geography. The 'old paradigm' in range ecology depended on three main sets of actors: (i) range ecologists who believed in Clement's (1916) model of succession and ecological stability; (ii) economists who believed in Hardin's (1968) concepts of the 'tragedy of the commons'; and (iii) authoritarian administrations which saw pastoralists as backward and destructive, and which had the power and the structures to use and perpetuate scientific paradigms. The so-called 'new paradigm' sees semi-arid ecosystems as being in permanent disequilibrium but persistent on broad temporal and spatial scales whilst many indigenous pastoral strategies are carefully adapted to these characteristics.

Migration in a segmented labour market.

Abstract: Current research in migration is moving on from neo-classical and behavioural perspectives to a more structural approach relating to wider processes issues of power and the particular role of employers. Within this programme a key issue for investigation is the interaction between spatial mobility and the structuring of labour markets. This paper focuses on the significance of labour market segmentation--in terms both of job stability and gender--for migration both theoretically and through an empirical analysis of data from the UK Labour Force Survey on sponsored and unsponsored moves. (EXCERPT)

Creating Transgressive Space: The Music of kd lang

Abstract: This paper examines how the music of kd lang is consumed by lesbian audiences. It makes a distinction between three processes of consuming music. First, it focuses on the consumption of live music at concerts. Secondly, it examines the way that music forms a backdrop to our everyday activities the soundscape and is therefore 'overheard' in public places. Finally, it considers the process of consciously listening to music. By examining these different acts of consumption, the paper considers how lang's music can facilitate the production of queer space and highlights tensions between the intentions of an artist in producing a sound and the way it is read by audiences.

Music and Cultural Politics: Ideology and Resistance in Singapore

Abstract: This paper focuses on popular music written and produced by Singaporeans to illustrate the nature of social relationships based on ideological hegemony and resistance. Analysis is based on two groups of music: ‘national’ songs supported by the government in the ‘Sing Singapore’ programme; and songs brought together in Not the Singapore song book Interviews with local lyricists and analysis of video productions provide supplementary information. Music is used by the ruling elite to perpetuate certain ideologies aimed at political socialization and to inculcate a civil religion that directs favour and fervour towards the nation. Music is also a form of cultural resistance against state policies and some social-cultural norms. Music embodies social commentaries on aspects of Singapore society, such as controversial government policies and the ostentatious lifestyle of many Singaporeans.

The Rhetoric of Regionalism: The Northern League in Italian Politics, 1983-94

Abstract: Research on the geography of political movements has tended to emphasize the social processes which produce support for the movements rather than the geographical objectives of the movements and the political basis of their appeal. This paper examines the rise of the Northemrn League in northern Italy in terms of the movement's rhetoric and support. The key argument is that this movement shifted its rhetoric from regional separatism to national populism as it gained in electoral strength in northemrn Italy and as the established parties of government collapsed. The original rhetoric of regionalism has given way to a rhetoric of national political renewal based on a projection of 'northern' political virtues. Although localistic in its social roots the Northemrn League has been drawn into a national political discourse in which national political ambitions have displaced regional ones. For even the most devotedly local of parties regional ambitions were not enough. This has implications for all forms of politics based on drawing an opposition between the local and the national.

'Home'-Making: On the Spatiality of Daily Social Reproduction in Contemporary Middle-Class Britain

Abstract: The paper examines the spatiality of day-to-day social reproduction in middle-class Britain. We argue that the concept of spatiality should be extended to include analyses of the production of home space, the meaning of which has received only limited attention from geographers. The potential spatial organization of the various tasks which constitute day-to-day social reproduction is contrasted with their spatial form in two historical conjunctures in Britain. In both cases (and despite the possibility of alternative arrangements) this spatial form is home-based. Using middle-class childcare as our illustration, we account for the persistence of this spatial organization in contemporary Britain, emphasizing the importance of the spatially prescriptive nature of the dominant ideology of childcare and of cultures of domesticity. In turn, the spatial organization of middle-class daily social reproduction is shown to be (re)constitutive of 'home'.

Discourse on migration and ethnic identity: interviews with professionals in Hong Kong.

Abstract: This paper has revealed a complex set of relationships between migration place and ethnic identity [in Hong Kong]. On the one hand ethnic identity is shaped by the places where people have lived particularly the places where they have spent the early years of their life; on the other [hand] places--being the context for socialization--provide the milieux where people learn who and what they are and how to act.... The authors note that "while legislation clearly regulates levels of immigration international migration is also self-regulated by potential migrants in relation to interpretations of their ethnic identities and their perceptions of other places." (EXCERPT)

Tradition and Paternity: Same Difference?

Abstract: plinary practice, both theoretical and institutional, is produced. The writing of certain kinds of pasts is legitimated by, and legitimates, only certain kinds of presents. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which the construction of geographical traditions is, at the same time, the construction of sameness and difference. Even more specifically, this essay concentrates on the ways gendered sameness and difference is constituted through some recent accounts of geographical traditions. Traditions are constructed: written, spoken, visualized, taught, lived. Traditions are representations of a past and the specific aspect of this complex process of representation I want to consider is the way in which the construction of a particular tradition is also always a practice of inclusion and exclusion. In terms of geographical traditionalizing, certain people or kinds of people are included as relevant to the tradition under construction and others are deemed irrelevant. In Stoddart's (1991) account, for example, only those who conformed to his notion of modem scientific research -

Making Music Work? Alternative Regeneration Strategies in a Deindustrialized Locality: The Case of Derwentside

Abstract: The closure of the British Steel Corporation's Consett works in 1980 marked the end of an era in north-west Durham as the last major element of the old coal and steel economy disappeared after 140 years. It produced fears of a profound economic and social crisis within the locality. It also served as a catalyst for devising and implementing new regeneration strategies: one based around a conventional reindustrialization programme, the other around local initiatives encompassing music and cooperative development. These alternatives are examined and related to more general debates about the possibilities for local development.

The Space for class? On class Analysis in the Study of Gentrification

Abstract: ion (mode of production; social formation; conjuncture). Three critical moments of the realization of class relations are identified at the three levels of abstraction: between speculator-developers and all inner-urban residents as gentrification is 'sanctioned' as a form of revalorization; petit-bourgeois entrepreneurial and rentier activity within the social formation; and, exceptionally, class action between middle-class and working-class residents. A full appreciation of the multiple determinations of class on gentrification and the effect of residence on class constitution must incorporate labour-market and workplace relations as well as an expanded view of residence to encompass the whole metropolitan area. The complex and contradictory realizations of the class relation posited by this method of abstraction reveal a robustness and subtlety which make it a more a promising basis than recent non-essentialist contributions for the retheorization of class and space.ion: between speculator-developers and all inner-urban residents as gentrification is 'sanctioned' as a form of revalorization; petit-bourgeois entrepreneurial and rentier activity within the social formation; and, exceptionally, class action between middle-class and working-class residents. A full appreciation of the multiple determinations of class on gentrification and the effect of residence on class constitution must incorporate labour-market and workplace relations as well as an expanded view of residence to encompass the whole metropolitan area. The complex and contradictory realizations of the class relation posited by this method of abstraction reveal a robustness and subtlety which make it a more a promising basis than recent non-essentialist contributions for the retheorization of class and space. key words class analysis gentrification levels of abstraction latent structuration residence Lecturer, School for Advanced Urban Studies, Rodney Lodge, Grange Road, Bristol BS8 4EA revised manuscript received 30 June 1994

The Geography of Deprivation in Rural Scotland

Abstract: This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the nature, intensity and distribution of deprivation in rural Scotland. Consideration of the relationship between rural restructuring and deprivation is followed by examination of key conceptual and methodological issues and identification of the socio-economic characteristics of rural Scotland. A combination of univariate and multivariate empirical analyses, undertaken at several geographic scales, illuminates the differential incidence of deprivation. Policy-related issues are considered and several questions identified for further research.

Awakening the dead: who needs the history of geography?

Abstract: value and relevance of expending energy studying the history of geography as a means of throwing light upon the state of the discipline today. Let me start with a reading of a single remark, unapologetically ripped out of its original context.I David Livingstone's The geographical tradition (1992) tells of an incorporative discipline always able to assimilate any and all challenges. Towards the end of the book, Livingstone provides an account of the emergence of quantitative spatial science and writes that he cannot provide an adequate treatment of the subsequent criticisms of this project because 'it is still much too early to attempt any rigorous contextual elucidation of these most recent moves' (ibid., 329). This comment crystallizes much of the metaphysics of context which underwrites the recent revival of interest in the history of geography. It can be read as an unwilling admission that 'contextualization' runs aground when it comes to openly and critically addressing the only context that really matters: the contemporary one. It also indicates that contextualization works only on something which is not still changing its shape on something which is dead and which can therefore be made into a clearly defined and recognizable object of knowledge. Above all, 'context' seems to be something in which you are definitely not inextricably entwined. Squeezing even further meaning from this innocent-looking statement, we can see that contextualization supports a mode of critical judgement that presupposes a position external to the inert context under examination, a safe distance from which one can decide upon the motivations, delusions and relative merits of different actors. Determined in this way, 'context' disqualifies as illegitimate any sort of radical transformative intervention in the contemporary formation of the discipline. The logic is simple: because spatial science and postpositivist geography are not yet dead, they resist contextualization. Consequently, the adoption of any critical attitude in relation to this field (that is, taking sides) must be suspended indefinitely since it would involve a necessarily partial decision. So we are left with the deceptively polite-sounding pluralist formulation by which Livingstone allows that everyone can dance their own step to their own particular tune, just as long as each and every one of them respects the basic house rule NO TOUCHING (cf. p 345). Despite being unable to take the necessary distance which would support a complete and final evaluation of Livingstone's project, I want to take this opportunity to mark my dissent from this version of the revivified historiography of geography and its model of academic responsibility, this being precisely the sort of action which, on my necessarily provisional reading anyway, this version seeks to squash. The renewal of interest in the history of geography is not exhausted by Livingstone's work. More openly 'critical' work is routinely framed by proclamations about the necessity of attending anew to origins of modem geography in order to understand the contemporary nature of the discipline. But such claims often have a rather hollow-sounding ring to them connections are more often loudly asserted than convincingly demonstrated. If it is essential to understand the past in order to understand the present, perhaps this is for more mundane reasons than this work might lead one to suppose. All academics have a vested interest in the value of