Riassunto esame geography / geografia, docente Zignale, libro consigliato Human geography: the basics, Andrew Jones

A second trend is the enormous diversification of activities that come under the label of a

“service”. There are lots of new kinds of service industry compared to even 30 years ago. One

important aspects of the diversification of services is the useful distinction between “producer”

services that are provided by firms to other firms and “consumer” services that are offered to

individuals. Regarding the former, industries such as accountancy, advertising or management

consultancy fall into this category, whereas consumer services include a whole range of industries

from leisure firms owning gyms and cinemas to classic services such as hairdressers.

Finally, the third trend around the service sector of the global economy is the growing importance

of certain types of services to the operation of all industries in the global economy. This bring us

back to the issues of the knowledge economy and specifically te increasing importance of

producer services. The growing importance of knowledge as an input into everything that is

produced in the global economy means that specialist producer services have become more

important. Whether or not the aircraft company Airbus can develop and sell a new model of place

is reliant on the inputs of many specialist firms offering services around a whole range of areas

including engineering, design, specialist recruitment, software and marketing.

The new economy and creative industries

One particular part of today’s global knowledge economy that has been of great interest to human

geographers is those industries that are associated with what is termed the ‘new economy’ and

that are in some way ‘creative’. One of the reasons that geographers have been especially

interested in these industries is partly because, in order to fully understand their development,

there is a need to explore different elements of the subject. While the above account of the

appearance of new service industries covers many aspects of this ‘new economy’ of recent

decades, not all of the industrial activity associated with this idea fits neatly into the category of

‘services’. Many new knowledge~based industries appear to make products rather than provide a

service (or at least do both), even if these are not material goods. These kinds of ‘creative

industries’ range from more traditional industries that have evolved - such as advertising and

marketing, music and the visual and literary arts - to more truly new activities that have only really

come into existence in recent years, such as computer games, film and television, media and web

design. They have been of significant interest to economists, business theorists and planners

because they are seen as key drivers of economic growth (especially within urban economies),

but geographers have also done a lot of work on these sector. They have, for example, examined

what makes successful computer games industries or examined clusters of designer firms in the

global fashion industry.

The reason for this may be the argument that a geographical approach is especially useful in

understanding the many factors that lead to the development of these industries. Creative

industries are impossible to understand without an appreciation of cultural transformations in

global society. Human geographers arguably have the edge in conceptualizing the development

of these new economi activities and creative industries over accounts in subjects such as

economics. One particular debate in this respect shows this very well: the idea that the people

who work in creative industries are the key to economic growth in city-region.

This new “creative class” includes not only artists and musicians but all kinds of jobs in fashion,

media, marketing and so on. One of the arguments is that these creative industries cluster in

attractive city environments that people in this creative class work in, which also links to ideas

about cluster and “local buzz” discussed earlier.

Agriculture and food

A fourth and final group of industries that geographical work has been concerned with provides a

contrasting example of the way in which the interdisciplinary nature of human geography is helpful

in understanding the complex changes in today’s global economy. In the case of agriculture and

food production, dramatic changes to the actors responsible for producing food together with the

way these industries are organized has brought huge changes and challenges to the landscapes

and environments that people around the world live in. Equally, as we mentioned when

considering consumption in the previous chapter, geographical work sees the issue of food

production as very closely tied to questions of consumption. ”Food is a geographical topic’. We

could argue that it is becoming ever more so as globalization processes further transform the way

in which the agricultural industry produces foods, and what foods people around the globe are

able and wish to eat. Three major aspects of geographical work on agriculture and food are worth

highlighting. First, a geographical approach is very much interested in where and how food is

produced and the complex system by which it is transported and sold to people to consume. The

concept of the global food chain traces the multiple connections to different places of production

for food and agricultural commodities.

Another second aspect of geographical interest in agriculture and food is also the social impact

of changing food production. With the increasing power and dominance of TNCS in food retailing

and agriculture in countries of both the global North and global South in the 21st century,

geographers have been concerned with the dramatic changes of livelihood that occur as

traditional rural ways of living disappear. Small farmers are being replaced by industrial agriculture

across the world, and transnational firms also increasingly dominate through their use of specialist

seeds.

Geographers have been interested in the responses to these changes including, attempt to

protect small food producers in the global South through cooperation and alternative food

networks.

Finally, as mentioned already, the changing nature of consumption of food has been of great

concern in cultural geography. The changing nature of food consumption is in part the result of

many factors over the last 50 years, including changing methods of food production and

distribution, as well as social and cultural transformation in many regions of the globe. Cultural

globalization has exposed many people to new kinds of food, and economic globalization has

enabled foods to be distributed to places where they were never previously available., These

processes mean that a wide variety of cuisines are increasingly available everywhere on the

planet.

Cities

The majority of people in the world today live in cities or places that would be described as

“urban”. In the richer countries of the global North, it is estimated that more than 70 per cent of

people live in urban areas and the developing countries in the global South are rapidly catching

up with this figure: the comparable figure is already 60 per cent. Human geographers have long

been interested in cities. Yet defining a city is itself tricky. Cities come in all shape and sizes, and

have very different make-ups, in terms of who lives in them. Geographers broadly have made use

od a series of criteria for defining an area as urban based on the size and density of the

population living in a particular place. The problem remains, that the nature of cities in today’s

world remain very diverse. Cities in the global South, for example, such as Mumbai, Mexico city or

Lagos have very different social structure, physical forms and urban politics from those of many

cities in Europe or North America.

Urbanization and urban form

The concept of urbanization refers simply to the way in which cities have grown as more and

more people have moved to live in them.Throughout most of the last couple of centuries,

urbanization has continued at a steady pace. Cities in the year 2000 were more numerous, had

bigger populations and covered more land than they did in 1900. The same is true of the previous

100 years. This process, however, has not always been either uniform or consistent for all cities in

all parts of the world. In the wealthier regions of the global North, large cities in the late 20th

century did also experience decline and an opposite process counterurbanization. However, for

the most part, it is urbanization processes that have been dominant. Both urbanization and

counterurbanization are of course inherently geographical phenomena insofar as they generally

involve movement of people to live in cities, and the physical growth of cities terms of land area.

Of equal interest to geographers, however, is wider question of how cities expand into new

territorial space, well as how they change over time. Geographers have therefore, a interest in

urban form — that is, the physical structure of how cities are laid out, where buildings are located,

what kinds of buildings are in particular areas of cities and what factors shaped this. One of the

classic models in urban geography proposed by the American sociologist Ernest Burgess. While

historically specific and simplistic models such as formed the basis for many attempts by urban

geographers to understand the form of cities, the sub—discipline remains closely. concerned with

how different areas of cities gain or lose land—use characteristics. In the last 60 years, major

debates in this respect have been concerned with how deindustrialization, flexibilization,

informationalization and globalization have affected urban form. These are enormous debates in

and of themselves, but we can briefly identify at least two overlapping features of changing urban

form that have concerned geographers.

A second set of changes to urban form that has concerned geographers relates to the

globalization of cities and their increasingly interlinkage into global city networks. Changing urban

form in many cities is a consequence of the relationship a city or area of a city has with the global

economy. The construction of new central business district areas or the gentrification of old poor

housing neighborhoods over recent decades is linked to the office space needs of transnational

firms and to the higher incomes of specialized service industry employees respectively.

Urban system and global city network

Historically, the origins of trying to understand cities as part of urban system related to the way in

which urban geographers sought to classify different types of cities within different countries and

nation-states. Such an approach established that larger cities played a more important role than

smaller ones within regions and countries.

Central place theory is based on assessing the functions fulfilled by different urban settlements

that were spread across a piece of territory, and argued that larger towns and cities provided more

important, rarer services to the surro