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

Geography / Geografia, docente Zignale

Libro consigliato: Human Geography: The Basics, Andrew Jones

What is human geography?

The ancient Greeks saw geographical knowledge as one of the leading forms of scholarship, and the birth of modern geography placed it at the forefront of expanding Western empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. Human geography is concerned with all aspects of human society on Earth, but in particular adopts a spatial approach. Human geographers share an interest in an enormous range of topics that are also the concern of other social science disciplines. Human geography is therefore all about understanding why the spatial nature of "social things" matter. Differences between places shape how the nature of how things develop.

Chapter - Globalization

Globalization

The history of the last 50 years or so has been a period during which human societies have become more interconnected than ever before. This is what the word "globalization" means at its broadest level. Globalization is not just about economic activity, more than the growth of global corporations such as McDonald's or the fact that you can buy iPods everywhere. It is also about the effect of many new aspects to life in today’s world (e.g., the effect of the emergence of the internet, the massive growth in cheap air travel). In contrast to the popular use of the word, human geographers imagine globalization to be some kind of general process of change, or a set of processes, which are dramatically altering the relationships between people and places, and generating new networks of activity and flow of people, ideas, and things across regions and continents.

Geographers and others have come up with several ideas to encapsulate this, the "annihilation of space by time", "time-space convergence", and "time-space compression". There is a debate about globalization. This may be in part because human geographers found early globalization theories rather simplistic, particularly those that famously argued that globalization represented an "end of geography" because everywhere was increasingly becoming "the same".

The world system

Capitalism is probably the most important concept of a social system used by human geographers. Marx was a 19th-century philosopher and political economist who is probably most famous for his political pamphlet "The Communist Manifesto" (1848) written with Friedrich Engels. Marx adopted a historical approach to understanding the nature of economic activity, and his work examines how the medieval feudal system in Western Europe based on agriculture and the rule of monarchs evolved into an industrial economic system based on money and private property.

Marx argues that the key issue is the way that those with money invest in the production of goods and services by buying land, machines, and labor. The aim of capitalists is to make a profit by selling goods for more than the total cost of the inputs into their production. Especially significant is that one of the major ways capitalists do this is by paying labor as little as possible. This caused the emergence of different social classes based on those who accumulated wealth (the capitalists) and those offering labor (the working class). For Marx, this system contains numerous problems and contradictions. The major one is that the whole system depends on people buying the goods being made by capitalist industry but, in seeking to increase profits, capitalists have an incentive to pay lower and lower wages. Over time, this means that demand for goods collapses, and production is no longer profitable.

The concept of a system is itself actually a metaphor taken from the natural sciences, where for example the Earth’s climate and living organisms are understood as being systems. In human geography, the concept of the system is most widely associated with the way it was developed by a social historian called Wallestein who proposed what is known as "world system theory" in the 1970s. This is in essence an early kind of globalization theory. It argues that capitalism has become the dominant form of economic organization and that this forms the basis for the modern world system we live in today.

Global society

Linked to debates about globalization and the nature of any world system is the idea that a global society has emerged in the last 50 years or so. Geographers characterized world society in the half of the 20th century around a three-way division: a "First World" composed of the advanced industrial countries (North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan); a communist "Second World" (USSR, China, and Eastern Europe); and the developing "Third World" (Central and South America, Africa, non-communist Asia).

It is important to remember that this idea of global society does not mean that all human societies have become the same. People across the globe still live in very different social environments in terms of the organizations they experience, the laws they are governed by, and the customs and practices of everyday life. The issue is more the degree to which these differences have been diluted everywhere on Earth by increasing levels of similarity. Human geographers analyze how flows of people through migration and travel affect the nature of society and lead to the development of common features across the globe.

Geopolitics

Geopolitics is the study of the effects of geography (human and physical) on international politics and international relations. Geopolitics is a method of studying foreign policy to understand, explain, and predict international political behavior through geographical variables. These include area studies, climate, topography, and demography. Geopolitics focuses on political power in relation to geographic space. Topics of geopolitics include relations between the interests of international political actors, interests focused on an area, space, geographical elements, or ways.

Geo-economies

One of the leading economic geographers, Peter Dicken, coined the idea of a "geo-economy" to describe the geographically uneven nature of economic activity. Dicken has mapped the development of globalized production and the internationalization of manufacturing and other industries. Dicken argues that the world economy today should be understood as a complex set of globalized geo-economies. He argues that globalization has produced "a new geo-economy" that is different from previous eras in terms of how the processes of production, consumption, and distribution are organized.

All three of these processes no longer just happen in a small number of specific places within states but exist as connections of many activities between places that are linked through flows of material objects and non-material elements.

Transnational corporations (TNCs)

The major actors in the new globalized geo-economy are "transnational corporations" (TNCs). Unfortunately, this is another ambiguous term because the idea of TNCs is the successor to earlier concepts - the multinational corporation (MNC) or multinational enterprise (MNE). The theoretical basis for distinguishing between a "multinational", a "transnational" or even a "global" firm rests on the degree to which these economic actors are globalized in three dimensions: how they produce goods or services, where they sell them, and how the firm is set up as an organization.

Car-makers such as Ford or General Motors, for example, bought foreign firms like Vauxhall in the UK or Opel in Germany, which made cars in their respective national markets. In other words, multinational firms became multinational either by setting up new, wholly separate operations in another country or by buying up existing foreign firms that already made the same products in another country. Since the 1980s, this has changed in several ways.

• There are far more firms operating in many countries and many different industries today.
• Today's transnational firms are not just companies from the rich global North but from many economies.
• Transnational firms these days are set up very differently, with companies organizing many parts of their business at a global rather than a national scale.

As their number and size continue to increase, these very large firms dominate global markets in all sectors of goods and services, and they account for an increasing proportion of total global output. This has significant impacts on people’s lives across the globe, for example, the decline of cities like Detroit. The ability of TNCs to open and close productive operations, along with their ability to avoid regulation and taxes by shifting production to cheaper, less highly taxed and regulated locations, has led critical commentators to argue that they have become too powerful in the context of contemporary globalization.

Global production networks

Related to these arguments about the way in which TNCs organize globalized production is the concept of the global production network. Components get shipped from one factory to another, and to make matters even more complicated, other aspects of production - such as design - might take place in yet another set of locations. This makes the labels "Made in the US" and "Made in China" both misleading and quite often inaccurate. It also means that it is increasingly difficult to see production as a process that occurs in one given place at a given time. GPNs are bigger, more complex networks of many global value chains, and have at least three dimensions that concern geographers: their governance, their spatiality, and what is called their territorial embeddedness (political).

Global trade

Trade in the world economy refers simply to the buying and selling of goods and services between actors in different places. As the world economy has become globalized, total trade has grown enormously, but trade benefits some localities and not others depending on the nature of their economies. In 2008, total world trade measured in terms of goods exported from one country to another amounted to US$15.8 trillion.

Global finance

Finance refers to the trade and circulation of many different types of money and financial products. Most money or "capital" in the global economy exists not as cash but in the abstract as bank loans, mortgages, or government bonds. Money fulfills five main functions in any economy: it is the means by which economic things are accounted for; the thing by which the value of everything else is measured in terms of; it stores this value; it provides a way of exchanging goods and services, and it is a way of paying for things.

Central to the current focus of human geographers’ interest in finance is the globalization of money and the emergence of a globalized financial system. What this means in essence is the way that markets for money have become international and no longer focused on national economies. Since the 1980s, it has become possible for banks and other financial firms to buy and sell many more different currencies, shares, and other financial products in an international marketplace with national governments no longer restricted as to how much of their currency can move in and out of their borders.

Debt

One of the most important aspects of the global financial system is debt. What money is owed by whom to whom across the planet has a complicated geography, and the implications of the historical and future development of this geography are the subject of much theorizing and analysis by geographers. Debt, of course, comes in many more forms than the kinds you may experience in daily life — credit cards, overdrafts, or mortgages to buy a house. Debt in the world financial system takes the form of a whole array of financial products that banks and other institutions trade in the markets. These include government and company debt (bonds), different kinds of bank loans, shares, as well as a whole array of more complex forms known as ‘derivatives’.

For geographers, however, what is important is not so much the technical aspect of the operation of these debt markets but rather the way in which debt has affected different people’s lives differently across the globe. This happens at a range of scales. For individuals, debt is significant because it shapes the opportunities and constraints they experience in life. However, the geography of national debt is also important. If nation-states borrow too much, they end up cutting jobs and public services, which can hinder a country’s longer-term prospects for economic growth, as well as negatively impacting on the populations that live there. In this respect, development geographers have examined in depth the consequences of events like the so-called 1980s ‘debt crisis’ when many developing countries were unable to continue to pay back their debts to banks in the developed world. The governments of countries such as Mexico then had to impose huge cuts in their own domestic expenditure, not only leading to hardship among their citizens but also arguably restricting economic growth for many years afterward.

More recently, in the aftermath of the global economic downturn from 2007, many developed economies — including the US and European states — have struggled with very high levels of sovereign debt. However, economic geographers have also been concerned with the wider implications of too much debt for the global economy as a whole. The geographer David Harvey, for example, has argued that the increasing power of integrated financial capitalism represents a potentially catastrophic threat to the global economy (Harvey 2011). Debt is a central aspect of this, as too much borrowing leads to financial crises that are no longer restricted to one country or region but are transmitted across the globe through financial markets.

Chapter - Development

The concept of development

The concept of development is controversial; in essence, it is based on the view that certain human societies on planet Earth are more advanced in some way than others. The word "development" became used as it is today from the mid-20th century. In a famous speech in 1949, the then US President Truman said that the "underdevelopment" world was both a "handicap and threat to themselves and the more prosperous areas".

Development was thus about the modernization and economic progress of countries, as measured by increases in the total output of the economies. The goal was for the poor countries of the "Third World" to "catch up" with the more advanced and wealthier economies of the capitalist western First World, and to a lesser extent of the communist Second World.

By the 1970s, critiques of this idea of development had appeared. For one thing, it was too narrow an idea, focused only on economic factors. It was argued that the concept needed to include a range of different kinds of measures of development. Yet more important was another challenge from development thinkers in the so-called "less developed countries". Using Marxist ideas, the Latin American "dependency school" argued that approaches to development based on capitalism were keeping the poor countries poor, rather than leading to economic growth. These thinkers argued that developing countries need to "uncouple" themselves from the world capitalist economy if they wished to develop, rather than engaging in greater embroiled in political and ideological discussions about whether the global economic system could reduce poverty and produce progressive change in the poorer regions of the world.

Human geographers were of course very much interested in the intrinsically spatial debates about the nature, effectiveness, and ideological basis of development. It should be apparent in light of the earlier discussion of globalization that the two phenomena are entwined. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of geographers is to argue that it is impossible to talk about these processes in isolation.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the debate about how development should be achieved became ever fiercer. A range of thinkers began to argue that the whole project of modern development was essentially a flawed activity designed to reinforce and maintain the wealth, power, and advantage enjoyed by the richer countries. By the 1980s, neoliberal economic globalization was seen as the manifestation of this project, and thus the target of the resistance.

Post development

Since the 1980s, a range of thinkers within development studies and development geography have questioned "the very idea of development itself". They argue that Development corresponds to both a concept and practice that originates and is based on the interest of the historically rich and powerful countries of the global North. A key thinker in this "post-development" perspective is Arturo Escobar, who argues that the post-Second World War view of modernizing development has "progressively turned into a nightmare" that has "failed". Writing in the mid-1990s, he argued that President Truman’s project had not only failed in alleviating poverty, but in fact, it had created a particular way of both representing the poorer parts of the world and a prescription for how to solve this perceived problem.

In particular, modern development understood the global South to be full of poverty, disease, and ignorance. Its solution was large government-led projects that were meant to help. For Escobar, such projects were ill-conceived, bad for local communities, and for the environment. Modernizing development was a problem itself!

Resistance

The critiques of development that have evolved over the last 60 years have led to an array of resistance movements across the globe. Human geographers are interested in the geographies of these spaces of resistance and in particular the relationship between resistance movements at different scales in a globalizing world. In that sense, the Marxist critiques of modernization theory that emerged in the 1970s represent an early form of resistance to development that has since developed into multiple ideas and activities. Today it is not possible to understand resistance to development without also discussing resistance.