The Dictionary of Human Geography (123 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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workers (Kearns and Barnett, 1999; Curtis, 2004, pp. 125 33). (NEW PARAGRAPH) On a different but related tack, researchers have explored more cultural aspects of health care (Gesler, 1991; Kearns and Gesler, 1998; Gesler and Kearns, 2002), prompting enquir ies into various cultural influences the ?thought worlds? of given societies, as well as everything from buried idEOLOGlES through to the discursive scripting of health policies that play out in the geographies of health care. Attention is paid to how agendas of power, control, medical authority and fiscal efficacy translate into the form, content and spaces of medical facilities, helping to explain location patterns (within overall systems), environmental associations (of particular facil ities) and even architectures, decorations and layouts (of, say, hospital wards). At the latter, distinctly human scale, focus alights on the embodied relations between the ?medics? and the ?medicalized?, and on how such relations are shaped by and performed across an array of in and out patient spaces of treatment, illuminating how both the power of the former is extended and the possible agency (maybe resistance) of the latter is expressed. This also means taking seriously the grounded experiences of the people involved, establish ing how they perceive, feel about and under stand what is occurring within spaces of health care, and recognizing the tensions that can fragment professional and lay judgements about what makes the best kind of ?place? for the delivery of the health care required (Milligan, 2001). Tellingly, this research strand begins to press at the limits of what is conven tionally meant by ?health care?, and has started to consider more ambiguous landscapes of health care what Gesler (1992) has termed ?therapeutic landscapes? wherein all manner of phenomena (mountains and springs, streets and malls) can be significant in how they pro mote or undermine senses of healthful well being for those who access them. A further elaboration is work on health practices that possess an awkward relationship to Western biomedicine that is, complementary and alter (NEW PARAGRAPH) native medicines, as well as the diverse forms of psychotherapy and counselling which then suggests a still more inclusive interest in ?geog raphies of care? (Conradson, 2003a) wherein the overtly medical element is largely left behind (and a large step is taken towards that post medical geography speculated about by Kearns, 1993). cpp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Curtis (2004); Gesler and Kearns (2002); Kearns (1993); Meade and Erickson (2000); Parr (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
megacities
Very large, high density urban centres, usually defined as those with popula tions exceeding 5 million. The International Geographical Union MegaCity Task Force (http://www.megacities.nl/) identified only four such centres in the 1950s, but 28 in 1985 and 39 in 2000: it estimates that there will be 60 by 2015. Most of these are in the ?developing world? (especially East and South Asia and LATIN AMERICA), are growing extremely rapidly, and face major problems of iNfRASTRUCTURE provision and social inequalities. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hall and Pain (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
megalopolis
AGreekword (combiningthose for ?great? and ?city?) coined by Patrick Geddes and adopted by Jean Gottmann (1915 94: see Gottmann, 1964) to describe the discontinuous urban complex of the USA?s northeastern seaboard. It was also used some decades before by Lewis Mumford (1895 1988): to him, megalopolis was the end state in the process of urbanization, in which giant, fragmented cities become dysfunctional, whereas Gottmann deployed it as a descriptive label for extensive urban sprawl. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Baigent (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
memory
An inherently geographical activ ity: places store and evoke personal and col lective memories, memories emerge as bodily experiences of being in and moving through space, and memories shape imaginative GEOGRAPhlES and material geographies of hOME, NEIGhBOURhOOd, CITy, NATION and empire. hUMAN GEOGRAPhy includes an important body of work on the role of the built landscape museums, monuments, arte facts, heritage sites in creating a sense of a common identity through memory, on how collective memories are made material in the landscape, and the practices of memory making through performances and rituals of remembrance. There is also a substantial literature on heritage entrepreneurship as a marketable good (see also postmodernism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Maurice Halbwachs? book On collective memory (1992 [1941]) was an important early text theorizing memory as simultaneously social and spatial (as opposed to highly indi vidualized and purely psychological) (Hebbert, 2005). Activities enhancing remembrance of a collective past, including commemorative rituals, story telling, place naming and the accumulation and display of relics, trigger a social memory that solidifies a common shared identity. Halbwachs emphasized the import ance of anchoring these memories in spatial imagery and physical artefacts, arguing that social memory endures best when there is a ?double focus a physical object, a material reality such as a statue . . . and also a symbol, or something of spiritual significance, some thing shared by the group that adheres to and is superimposed upon this physical reality' (1992 [1941], p. 204). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This focus on the social constitution and context of memory informed French historian Pierre Nora?s (1997) influential project, which traced the development of French national identity through the analysis of a variety of ?lieux de m?moires?, or sites of memory (see also nationalism). Nora (1989, p. 9) argued that with the demise of peasant societies, ?true memory', available ?in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent self knowledge, in unstud ied reflexes and ingrained memories', has been replaced by ?modern memory' that is self conscious, historical and archival. In modern society, we ?must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations because such activities no longer naturally occur? (1989, p. 12). In short, the primordial memory of peasant societies embedded in milieux de m?moires (environments of memory) has been substituted by much more self consciously created lieux de memoires. The production of these lieux, or sites, has been a result of the transformations wrought by modernity, including gLobaLization, the rise of mass media and the institutionalization of a professional discipline of history. While Nora's distinction between true and modern memory may be overwrought, in the 1980s his work spawned widespread interest in memory and place throughout the humanities and social sciences, and it continues to provide the impetus for a vast array of studies of dif ferent types of memory spaces (Legg, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The dominance of the nation state in framing memory has been the focus of much research on monuments and memorials. Because memory is always shadowed by for getting, is vulnerable to manipulation and has a capacity to facilitate (or coerce) social cohe sion, what is remembered and forgotten in national memory both reflects power relations and is of political consequence. Elite and dominant memory is typically mobilized by the powerful in the cultivation of a national imaginary, through monuments, memorials, public ritual, architectural and urban design, and through the erasure of previous place names or settlements of the dispossessed. However, human geographers have regularly noted the contested nature of meaning sur rounding even official symbolic sites, and the production and consumption of such sites often involve conflict (Till, 2001, 2005; Foote, 2003). They are neither uniformly designed nor read (and space is significant in the construction of that meaning; Johnson, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Nor do elites inevitably have a hold on landscape production. Burk (forthcom ing) describes the creation by grassroots groups in Vancouver of monuments to me morialize violence against women. Recogniz ing the ?power of place? to repair cultural amnesia and nurture a more inclusive public memory, Hayden (1997) details a series of commemorative projects that concretize long histories of settlement of African American, Latina and Asian American families in down town Los Angeles. Alderman (2003, p. 171) has examined how African Americans strug gled to control and determine the scale of streets in which Martin Luther King Jr. would be remembered and thus the scale at which his memory would find public expres sion. He notes that the scale of memory was ?open to redefinition not only by opponents to his political/social philosophy but also people who unquestionably embraced and benefited from this philosophy'. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Memory cannot be dictated, and popular memory can be an important vehicle through which dominant, official renditions of the past and present are resisted by mobilizing groups to create subaltern and counter memories, and alternative futures (Legg, 2005). Shared memories of loss and longing for land may form the basis for collective claims to rights or reparation: Kosek (2004) argues that shared memories of dispossession from land by Mexicans living in northern New Mexico are what make the Hispanic community in this region of the USA cohere as a social and political force. The same could be argued for Palestinians or, in Canada, First Nations groups. In diasporic and post colonial con texts in which memory is threatened by both nostalgia and coerced assimilation ?cultu ral memory offers promise of epistemological grounding?, though not necessarily within a singular national identity (Sugg, 2003, p. 469: see also diaspora; post coLoniaLism; TraNsNa TioNALism). Counter memories may be assembled and transmitted through oral tradition, but also in less bureaucratized time places: the body, domestic spaces (Blunt, 2003), neighbourhoods or ?temporal re territorializations? of formal spaces (such as carnivals, festivals or rallies; Legg, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The memory projects of marginalized groups may bear the traces of trauma, such that the possibilities of memory are altered. With traumatic recall, events remain in the vivid present, resisting integration through narrativization. Though the sTaTe often in corporates violent or tragic events into a linear narrative of national redemption and over coming, what Edkins (2003) calls ?trauma time? works differently, and its repetitive dis ruptive quality can reveal the violent founda tions of sovereigN power. Trauma thus has a relation not just to Time but also space and geography; for instance, to narrations and experiences of nation and persistent claims to homeLaNd. Sugg (2003) draws on Hirsch?s concept of post memory to understand the ?suspended migration? of second generation Cuban Americans: chiLdreN of exiled parents may inherit the collective cultural trauma of their parents and remember their parents? stories of exile as their own within a dynamic of longing and return. Alternatively, memor ializing trauma in the landscape may consti tute a witnessing public, setting in motion an emerging narrative (and a potential release from traumatic recall; Burk, forthcoming). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The recent tendency has been to expand the scope of memory studies by considering the role of performance and bodily and non bodily practices in the making of memorial landscapes (Hoelscher, 2003), by examining the wider production of social memory beyond demarcated sites of monuments and memor ials, and by considering the landscape impli cations of the memories of ANimaLs or other than human beings (Lorimer, 2006). Nj/gp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Johnson (2003b, 2005); Legg (2007a); Till (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
mental maps/cognitive maps
Perhaps the best known research outcome from behav ioural geography was the retrieval of the imagined or mental maps widespread in the popular knowledge of places, mental con structs that were seen as intervening between geographical settings and human action. An early study was the simple sketch mapping of urban areas from memory supervised by Kevin Lynch in the pursuit of good urban design, which permitted an image of the city to be con structed, revealing districts of knowledge and ignorance, and the role of such remembered features as nodes, edges and landmarks in establishing urban legibility. Behavioural geo graphers, including Roger Downs and David Stea (1973), in contrast referred to cognitive maps, which they associated with the spatial tasks of orientation and way finding. More formal and widely replicated were the experi ments with paper and pencil tests conducted by Peter Gould and his students (Gould and White, 1993 [1974]), which were intended not so much to identify place knowledge and place ignorance but, rather, to establish a sur face of place preferences. From surveys in sev eral countries, mental maps were constructed that revealed both a national preference surface and also a local surface of desirability for a home area. Subsequent work sought to estab lish the developmental growth of maps among children of increasing age, and examined linkages between geographical preference surfaces and future residential choice and migration propensities (Gould and White, 1993 [1974]). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Mental maps were part of a broader move ment in environmental perception, which in turn has elided into an interest in the repre sentation and social construction of places in a variety of disciplines using less positivist methods and emphasizing social rather than psychological factors. Nonetheless, the older analytical methods continue to generate inter esting results (Kitchin, 1994), even if with interdisciplinary dissemination the links with the original work are truncated or forgotten. So a current study of the role of the media in shaping the spatial surface of fear in Los Angeles (Matei and Ball Rokeach, 2005), contains the key words mental maps, GIS and spatial effects, but omits any reference to Gould?s work, including his celebrated feature in Time magazine that included a map of the perceived fear of urban areas. dl (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gould and White (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
metageography
?The set of spatial struc tures through which people order their know ledge of the world: the often unconscious frameworks that organize studies of history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, or even natural history? (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, p. ix). The prefix ?meta ? implies an abstraction, a concept that in some sense goes beyond the term to which it implies, so by extension a metageography is a conceptual grid that structures how geographies are ordered. These grids are cultural constructions, and the emphasis Lewis and Wigen place on the fact that they are used more or less automatically and unconsciously, without critical reflection, con nects the concept to that of a GEOGRAhlCAL im AGlNARy. ?Meta ? can also imply an umbrella concept, and Lewis and Wigen focus their at tention on the global scale and the conventional division of the world into continents. But the division of the globe into a mosaic of states is no less commonplace and taken for granted, against which Beaverstock, Smith and Taylor (2000) have proposed ?a new metageography?: a global NETwoRk of flows between cities. dG (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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