The Dictionary of Human Geography (134 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
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nature
A term with three main meanings: (NEW PARAGRAPH) the essence or defining property of some thing; (NEW PARAGRAPH) a material realm untouched by human ac tivity; and (NEW PARAGRAPH) the entire living world, of which the human species is a part. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These meanings often overlap and are sometimes contradictory. They are used in, and reproduced through, everyday speech as well as artistic and scientific discourses. This multivalency led the cultural critic Raymond Williams to observe that ?nature is perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language? (1983 [1976], p. 221) and that a history of its changing use would amount to a history of a large part of human thought (ibid., p. 225). Something of these complexities and histories can be glimpsed by juxtaposing two Anglo Western attitudes to nature that are 300 years apart. The leading British political commentator John Locke, writing in the late seventeenth century, as the European settlement of North America got under way, made the following obser vation: (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the first ages of the world men were more in danger to be lost, by wandering from their company, in the then vast wilderness of the earth, than to be straitened for want of room to plant in. And the same measure may be allowed still without prejudice to anybody, as full as the world seems. (Locke, 1988 [1690], p. 294) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Writing in the late twentieth century, as cLi mate change entered global public conscious ness, the North American environmental observer Bill McKibben articulates a very different vision: (NEW PARAGRAPH) An idea, a relationship, can go extinct just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is ?nature?, the separate and wild prov ince, the world apart from man. [ . . . ] By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence and that is fatal to its meaning. (McKibben, 1990, pp. 48 and 58) (NEW PARAGRAPH) As both of these accounts suggest, there is a powerful geographicaL imaginary associated with the idea of nature, particularly with the second of the three meanings identified above. This geographical imaginary translates the cat egorical opposition between things attribut able to nature and those attributable to human society into a spatial purification, in which nature is understood as a pristine wiL derness a space time outside or before the presence (or taint) of human settlement or activity (Cronon, 1995). It is an imaginary with very real consequences as it is taken up and reproduced through scientific, political and legal practices (Delaney, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Alongside space and place, the question of nature is one of the most central and enduring of geographical concerns (Fitzsimmons, 1989). As every undergraduate knows, geography stakes its disciplinary identity on being uniquely concerned with the interface between natural environments and human cultures. Nowhere is this better epitomized than in the work of Carl Ortwin Sauer in the 1920s and the legacy of the Berkeley school, with its emphasis on cultural landscape in which ?culture is the agent [and] the natural area the medium? (Sauer, 1963b [1925], p. 343). However, even here, it is evident that this definitive geograph ical concern has tended to be cast in terms that engage the world as if it were already divided up into things belonging either to nature or to culture, a division entrenched in the very fabric of the discipline and reinforced by the sometimes faltering conversation between human and physical geographers (see GEo graphy; physical geography). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In consequence, as human geographers set about trafficking between nature and culture, a fundamental asymmetry in the treatment of things assigned to these categories has been smuggled in to the enterprise. Geographies, like histories, become stories of exclusively human achievement played out over, and through, a seemingly indifferent medium of matter and objects made up of everything else. Such stories percolate through diverse currents in human geography. These include Marxist accounts which advance the appar ently contradictory idea of the ?production of nature?, arguing that more and more of the things we are accustomed to think of as natural from resources to landscapes have increasingly become refashioned as the products of human labour (e.g. Mitchell, 1996; Gandy, 2002). Such accounts identify this intensifying social capacity to produce nature as second nature, a distinct phase in the historical development of nature culture relations that supersedes its original or ?God given? state first nature (Smith, 1990). Equally, they include cultural accounts that explore postmodern theories to understand better the ways in which our ways of seeing nature are always mediated and shaped by representational practices and devices from cartographic surveys to wildlife film making (e. g. Wilson, 1992). These accounts emphasize the politics of representation, recognizing that representational processes are instrumen tal in constituting our sense ofwhat the natural world is like, rather than merely a mirror image of a fixed external reality. In consequence, such accounts suggest, multiple and often incom patible representations of the same natural phenomena or event can and do coexist (e.g. Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Whether their emphasis has been on nature's material transformation or on its changing meaning, these are geographies whose only subject or active inhabitants are people, while everything else is consigned to nature and becomes putty in our hands. In this, human geography's long march from environmental determinism to social con structionism seems to have brought us to the same place as that identified by the environ mentalist Bill McKibben as the ?end of nature? (see Castree, 2005a). This humanist stance is premised on two working assumptions (see humanism). The first is that the collective ?us' of human society is somehow always al ready removed from the rest of the world, for only by placing it a priori at a distance can human society be (re)connected to everything else on such asymmetrical terms as those be tween producer and product, or viewer and view (Ingold, 2000). The second is that in different ways the generative energies of the Earth itself, in rivers, soils, weather and oceans and the living plants and creatures assigned to ?nature', are effectively evacuated from the terms of these analyses (Haraway, 1991c). Such assumptions do not square with the an guish and infrastructure of existential concern that characterize the twenty first century. In unimaginable and unforeseen ways, the force fulness of all manner of things has come to make itself felt in our social lives and political agendas. From climate change to mad cow disease, there is a growing sense that our worldly interactions with, and indifference to, more than human forces and entities are returning to haunt us. Since the last edition of this Dictionary was published (2000), a major thrust of work in human, particularly cultural, geography has been to challenge these premises and rethink the ?human', and the status of the ?non human', in the fabric of human geography (Whatmore, 2002b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Much of this work has drawn inspiration from post structuralist philosophies rela tively new to geography, through intermediar ies such as science and technology studies (STS) (see Hinchliffe, 2007). The argument advanced here is that what we are experien cing is less a ?crisis of nature? and more a ?crisis of objectivity?, in which the things ascribed to nature are refusing to stay passively in their boxes and are assuming their irrepressible part in the possibilities and achievements of social agency that had been falsely ascribed exclusively to humans (Latour, 2004, p. 21). Taking up this argument, human geographers have been exploring the intricate and dynamic ways in which people, technologies, organisms and geophysical processes are woven together in the making and remaking of spaces, places and landscapes. Three of the most important currents in recent work in this vein have been those addressing post colonial, animal and bodily reframings of what matters, what must be taken into account, in the making of human geographies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first current is concerned with showing that the idea of nature as a pristine space out side society is an historical fallacy. This idea is so pervasive today that it is difficult for many of us to recognize it as a particular and con testable way of seeing the world. A specific concern has been to expose the ways in which the presence of native peoples was actively erased from the landscapes that came to be seen as wilderness in colonial European eyes (see colonialism), and that are now re vered by many environmentalists as remnants of ?pristine? nature (e.g. Braun, 2002). The second current extends this historical repudi ation of the separation of human society and the natural world by paying close attention to the mixed up mobile lives of people, plants and animals in everyday life time out of mind. Here, animals have become a vehicle for opening up the ways in which non human creatures have long been caught up in all man ner of social networks, from farming to wild life, in ways that disconcert our assumptions about their, and our, ?natural? place in the world. The third, and perhaps most provoca tive, current of work in this vein explores the bodily as an important site for geographical research in which the human, quite as much as the non human, is molten in the heat of technological achievements that recombine the qualities associated with these categories in new forms ranging from transgenic organ isms to bionic enhancements (e.g. Thrift, 2005a: see also BoDy; cyBoRg). sw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
neighbourhood
An urban area dominated by residential uses. While no fixed scALE can be assigned, neighbourhoods have tradition ally been understood to be relatively small or walkable, although they may vary considerably in terms of population (Martin, 2003). Neighbourhood has long been conflated with the notion of coMMuNlty as described in the work of the chicAgo schooL sociologists. Neighbourhood is the more explicitly territorial concept of the two. Efforts at defining and using the term ?neighbourhood? fall roughly into four areas: typologies (identifying primary neigh bourhood characteristics); neighbourhood change; neighbourhood effects; and as a terri tory for political action (Martin, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Typologies of neighbourhoods draw upon and also echo the conflation with community in the Chicago School approach. These com bine physical and social features of territor ies within cities in order to classify each area as some type (Hunter, 1979). The features included in such typologies include race and EthNicity, RELigioN, family status, and class of the area population, housing tenure, age and other iNfRAstRuctuRE characteristics. Neighbourhood types can then be correlated with neighbourhood change over time, drawing upon the notion of MoBiLity associated with the Chicago School and from invasion and succession. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Neighbourhood change focuses on both popu lation and infrastructure. Population may change by one or more measures (such as dominant ethnicity or household structure) due to residential mobility (where people move to a different area within a city or a different location entirely). A neighbourhood?s physical infrastructure changes due to decline (due to age or active disinvestment) or renewed investment (as with urban re NEWAL or gENTRIficAtioN). (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?neighbourhood effects? approaches in vestigate neighbourhoods as loci of social norms that shape individual attitudes, experi ences and health (Hunter, 1979; Ellaway, Macintyre and Kearns, 2001). This literature seeks to link individual outcomes with local social and physical conditions. For example, Ellaway, Macintyre and Kearns (2001) found that individuals perceive their hEALth differ ently depending upon physical conditions of the neighbourhood. However, Mandanipour, Cars and Allen (2000) argued that structural exclusions of the poor (e.g. uneven access to resources, due to segregation) are more powerful forces in an individual?s life chances than local cultural factors. (NEW PARAGRAPH) An approach that highlights the contingency of any definition of neighbourhood upon local context and/or scholarly purpose is that of conceptualizing neighbourhood as a territory for political action (Martin, 2003). In this concep tualization, neighbourhoods are constituted by practice: daily life and particular social and political claims, which are dynamic over time and space. The particular meaning of neighbourhood as a social community or (NEW PARAGRAPH) historical district, for example will be articu lated and deployed according to the people involved and issues at stake. As the other three approaches suggest, ?neighbourhood? is a term that is highly dependent upon the par ticular location in which it is embedded, the local political and social cuLture, and the perspective of the individual experiencing or observing the neighbourhood. dgm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Mitchell (1993); Urban Studies (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
neighbourhood effect
A type of context uaL effect whereby the characteristics of people?s local social milieux influence the ways in which they think and act. Neighbours present individuals with modeLs of attitudes and practices that may either: (a) conform to their own, and so reinforce their self identity and behaviour; or (b) contradict them and sug gest alternatives that they may adopt, especially if there is considerable pressure to do so. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The search for neighbourhood effects has been especially characteristic of eLectoraL geography, with a number of studies showing greater spatial polarization of, for example, support for a political party in an area than suggested by its residents? characteristics. Most of those studies use aggregate data, how ever, and may involve an ecoLogicaL faLLacy. Relatively little is known about the processes that generate the observed patterns, although the importance of interpersonal influence is often assumed, generating what is known as ?conversion through conversation?. Similar effects are postulated in the spread of other attitudes and behaviour patterns, in educa tion, for example. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Johnston and Pattie (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
neighbourhood unit
A relatively self con tained urban residential area. Most units are in planned residential developments, either suburban districts or new towns and similar settlements. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The concept of a neighbourhood unit was first deployed in Chicago in 1916 and formal ized by Clarence Perry (1872 1944) in 1929. It suggested the importance of scaLe in plan ning residential areas: each neighbourhood unit should be of sufficient size that it was relatively self contained for certain functions primary schools and daily shopping, for ex ample and should develop as an integrated community. British garden cities were planned with neighbourhood units of about 5,000 persons: all unit facilities were within walking distance and motorized transport largely excluded. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although the general concept continues to underpin some urban pLanning, the assump tion that people wish to constrain parts of their daily/weekly lives to such relatively small bounded territories has generated criticism, while greater reliance on personal transport has broken down the utility of such a cellular division of urban space. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hall (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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