The Dictionary of Human Geography (15 page)

blockbusting
A tactic engaged by American land speculators to buy housing units and then rent or sell them at inflated prices. In cities such as Chicago, industrialization, African American migration to northern cit ies and racial segregation resulted in a grow ing, but spatially contained, African American population (Philpott, 1991 [1978]). In White neighbourhoods adjacent to this African American ghetto, real estate agents would sell or rent a vacant unit to an African American household, then use fear tactics about lower home values and racial change to persuade white homeowners to sell. Units would then be sold or rented to African American households at grossly inflated prices. The result spatially expanded the ghetto (Hirsch, 1983). dgm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hirsch (1983). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
body
A rapidly growing field within geog raphy deals with social and spatial concep tions of the human body often located in the tension between the body as a social and a biological phenomenon. This upsurge of interest in the body does not confine itself to geography, but occurs all over the social sci ences and humanities. The background might be found in a mixture of circumstances. Some authors refer it to changes in the cultural land scape of late modernity, involving a rise of consumer culture and self expression. Others regard it primarily as a theoretical interven tion, rectifying a former deficiency in social theory. And for still others, feminism is held responsible for putting the body on the intel lectual map. Initially, there is a division in the social theory of the body, one that is often attributed to Maurice Merleau Ponty and Michel Foucault, respectively. On the one side stand analyses of the body as lived, active and generative, and on the other side studies of the body as acted upon, as historically inscribed from without. Still other approaches are informed by psychoanalytic theory. These different approaches are mostly translated into geography by means of feminist writings. A major source is Judith Butler?s Foucauldian theory of performAtivnr, under stood as ?the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effect that it names? (1993a, p. 2). For Butler, the body is socially constructed, embodying possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. Moi (1999), following Simone de Beauvoir, forwards a concept of the body as a ?situation? a situation amongst many other social ones, but fundamental in the sense that it will always be a part of our lived experience and our coping with the environment. Grosz (1994) argues for a sexed corporeality in which Alterity is consti tutive of (material, psychological and cultural) bodies and emphasizes the volatile boundaries of the bodies, permeated by bodily flows and fluids (see also Abjection). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Within geography, the degree to which time geogrAphy dealt with the body is a con tested matter, but two approaches to human geography in the 1970s and 1980s did contain traces of the body. In humanistic geography, lived and sentient body subjects appeared, and in marxist geography the body was im plicitly present in notions of the material re production of labour power. The real upsurge of interest in the body, however, occurred in the 1990s, not surprisingly led by feMinist geographies. This work can be summarized around three themes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first one is the body as the geography closest in. It includes the spatiaLity of the body, drawing on phenomenology or on Lefebvre?s theory of the production of space, including both the generative spatializ ing body and the historical confinement of the body in abstract space (Simonsen, 2005). Mostly, however, the literature has dealt with the inscription of power and resistance on the body, concurrently involving issues of performativity, body politics and the body as a site of struggle. Due to her processual, non foundational approach to identity, many have incorporated Butler?s notion of perfor mativity into their work on the intersections between gender, sexuaLity, space and pLace (NEW PARAGRAPH) for example, the performance of gay skin heads and lipstick lesbians in sexualized spaces (Bell, Binnie, Cream and Valentine, 1994), or gendered performances of work identities within the finance industry (McDowell and Court, 1994). The notion is, however, con tested. For example, Nelson (1999) criticizes the translations of the language of performa tivity into geography for not being aware of what she sees as its radical representational notion of body and subjectivity, in this way initiating a lively discussion of the limits of performativity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The second, related, theme is other bodies. Taking off from the insights of feminism, post structuraLism and post coLoNiausm, it tackles the necessity of acknowledging differences and power in embodiment. The body is central in the process where dominant cultures designate certain groups (disabled, elderly, homosexual, fat, female, people of colour, people of other nations and so on: see ageism; oisabiLity; ethnicity; homophobia ano heterosexism; racism; sexuaLity) as Other. Subordinate groups are defined by their bodies and according to norms that diminish and degrade them as ugly, loathsome, impure, deviant and so on, while privileged groups, by imprisoning the Other in her/his body, are able to take on the position as disembodied subjects. This ?scaling of bodies? has provoked analyses that on the one hand expose processes of dom ination and socio spatial exclusion (Sibley, (NEW PARAGRAPH) and on the other explore struggles for recognition and appropriation of space. A well developed area within this group is Queer theory, which explores negotiations and conflicts over symbolic and material spaces marked by exclusionary imperatives and politics. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Third, philosophies on the body have inspired theorists to dismantle dualisms that have long troubled Western thought and culture. Primarily, the mind/body dualism is addressed, subsequently leading to the ones of subject/object, cuLture/Nature, sex/geNoer and esseNtiaLism/constructionism. Feminists have shown how such dualisms have been strongly gendered, connecting the female body to nature, emotionality, non consciousness and irrationality. Substantially, the dismant ling of dualisms has worked as a means to expose the instability and fluidity of bodily ascribed identities. Epistemologically, it has enforced the acknowledgment that not only the objects of analysis but also the geographer her /himself are embodied. Many geographers have, at least in principle, adopted the notion of embodied or situated KNowLeoge as a substitute for decontextualized, disembodied, ?objective? knowledge. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As pointed out by several authors (e.g. Call ard, 1998), the first wave of body literature within geography favoured particular ways of understanding the body. A wealth of studies was devoted to body inscriptions, body regimes and discourses on bodies, while practices of (NEW PARAGRAPH) material and fleshy bodies attracted less attention. This gap has, however, started to be filled: Longhurst (2001) implements (NEW PARAGRAPH) Grosz?s theory of the volatile materiality of the body through ideas of body boundaries, body fluids, abjection and (im)pure spaces; studies on illness, impairment and disability explore ?body troubles? in everyday coping with the environment; and theories of practice and non representational theory focus on moving bodies and the performative and material nature of embodiment. The latter also dissolves the distinction between the human and non human, the organic and non organic (see also cyborg). ks (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bell and Valentine (1995); Butler and Parr (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Longhurst (2001); Nast and Pile (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
border
A form of boundary associated with the rise of the modern nation state and the establishment of an inter state geopolitical order, founded most famously with the foundational myths of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia (Teschke, 2003) on the political norms of national states claiming and using terror to control territory (as the etymology is also sometimes interpreted: see Hindess, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Both on maps and on the ground, borders make spaces of national sovereignty, and are thus key sites where the ?inside versus outside? distinctions of territoriality and modern international relations are at once reproduced, reinforced, contested and transcended (Walker, 1993; Agnew, 2003a). Thus, as the French philosopher Etienne Balibar suggests, borders are ?overdetermined, and in that sense, sanctioned, reduplicated and relativized by other geopolitical divisions? (Balibar, 2002, p. 79). It is for this same rea son that political geographers have increas ingly focused on what many call ?re (b) ordering? (Newman, 2002; Kolossov, 2005; Van Houtum, 2005; Van Houtum, Kramsch and Zierhofer, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Borders appear in geopolitical discourses that at once reproduce and reinforce the nation state. In media ranging from the legal and pedagogic to the prosaic and banal from court case cartography, school maps and mu seums, to murals, cartoons and even weather forecasts imaginative geographies script and thereby sanction the divisions of national borders (Paasi, 2005a; Sparke, 2005; Ander son, 2006a; Painter, 2006). These cultural geographies of border construction in turn inform the actual enforcement of borders on the ground through both social practices and state practices of border control (Nevins, 2002; Coleman, 2005). Many border but tressing social practices are xenophobic, and remain animated today in many parts of the world by provincial, racist and/or masculinist fantasies about foreign ?floods? overwhelming homeland defenses (see Theweleit, 1987; Darian Smith, 1999; Wright, 1999b; Price, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . However, while such social reinfor cement continues to reduplicate twentieth century divisions produced by liberal regimes of ethno racial and sexual governmentality, contemporary state practices of border control are simultaneously being shaped by the new class divisions and related but con text contingent recombination of neo liberal governmentality with neo liberal governance. It is in this way that the borders inside and around various free trade regions are being both softened and hardened simultaneously. Within the EU (Sparke, 2000a; Walters, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , the NAFTA region (Bhandar, 2004; Coleman, 2005; Gilbert, 2007), and diverse, smaller scale cross border free market development zones (for which the Malaysia Indonesia Singapore growth triangle is the prototype; see Sparke, Sidaway, Bunnell and Grundy Warr, 2004), governments are attempting to bifurcate border management: facilitating fast crossing for business travellers and increasing punitive policing of working class ?others? deemed dangerous to the neo liberal free market order. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The neo liberal class divided relativization of borders is not happening in the same way everywhere. Within the NAFTA zone there remain all sorts of informal cross border economies (see Staudt, 1998), and in Europe, while the old Cold War East German/West German border has turned into an Ossie/ Wessie social class divide (Berdhal, 1999), the Iron Curtain border of the cold war past has not been bifurcated but, rather, sub sumed into an EU growth and integration zone (Scott, 2002; Smith, 2002a). And these kinds of complexities seem minor in contrast to the ways in which the new border between Israeli occupied enclaves and Palestinian controlled parts of the West Bank reduplicates the geopolitics of religious and ethnic divi sions with a vengeance, all the while relativiz ing the old Green Line and hopes of a ?good border? by imposing a monumental and mili tarized class divide with the new concrete curtain of the colonial present (Gregory, 2004b; Newman, 2005; see also Falah and Newman, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Contextual contingencies noted, the emer gence of a transnational business class with increasingly global rights to own property, make contracts and move freely has clearly been marked at and on borders the world over. State border management is becoming increasingly transnationalized in its global co ordination, with border relativizing reliance being placed on individualized biometric codes rather than traditional national pass ports (Adey, 2004; Salter, 2007). Meanwhile, as the US continues to wage its so called war on terror, the soft cosmopolitanism of the border crossing kinetic elites seems set to be accompanied by the creation of a carceral cosmopolitanism for those border crossers deemed a threat to the free world (Sparke, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Within these developments we can see to return to a term of Balibar?s the ?other scene? of borders today: a scene in which the sovereignty system supposedly established at Westphalia is superseded by a new kind of global ?terrortory?, delinked from the nation state and its geographical borders (cf. Kelly, 2005; Hindess, 2006). ms (NEW PARAGRAPH)
borderlands
A key term in two contempo rary literatures, the concept metaphor of bor derlands is employed alternatively as either a research re focusing concept for scholars who study cross border regional development (e.g. Pratt and Brown, 2000), or as a meaning re making metaphor designed to disrupt normal izing notions of nation and the nation state (e.g. Anzaldua, 1999). Both uses of the term refer back to the geographical regions sur rounding international borders, and both also frequently involve attempts to describe the lives and imaginative geographies of people whose daily practices, economic activ ities and cultural connections cross the bor ders that define nation states. But whereas research on cross border regional develop ment tries to draw analytical comparisons between different models of borderlands governance, work on the multiple meanings of borderlands seeks to find antidotes to nationalist chauvinism and attendant forms of ethnic absolutism in the cross cultural intermixing of everyday borderland life. This does not mean that the disruptive uses of the term are always focused on just cultural hybridity. There are some brilliant border lands studies that underline how everyday eco nomic, social and political ties across border regions are just as disruptive of normative assumptions about nation states and related forms of gendered, racialized and/or ethnicized identity (Staudt, 1998; Berdahl, 1999; Darian Smith, 1999, Price, 2004). Likewise, there are also many usefully sober ing studies that show how, in all too many cases, such disruptions still continue to be exploited, controlled and/or destroyed through various combinations of state and market mediated vioLence (Wright, 1999b; Nevins, 2002; Lindquist, 2004; Coleman, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Inspired in part by the studies that highlight how power relations become particularly evi dent in borderlands, and catalysed by an emerging governmental interest in cross border regional planning, there has been a recent explosion of articles and edited volumes on border region development that are in creasingly attuned to the ways in which such regions make manifest diverse political geog raphies of reterritorialization (Eskelinen, Lii kanen and Oksa, 1999; Perkmann and Sum, 2002; Nicol and Townsend Gault, 2005; van Houtum, Kramsch and Ziefhofer, 2005). While a few contributions to this literature seek to emulate a corporate transnationaL ism and promote branded borderlands for capitalist development (e.g. Artibise, 2005), other works critically chart the ways in which such place promotionalism feeds into and out of the cross border regional entrenchment of neo LiberaLism (Perkmann, 2002; Nicol and Townsend Gault, 2005; Sparke, 2005). But borderlands continue to be shaped by a multitude of other forms of reterritorialization too, and whether these take geographical shape as geopolitics (see Scott, J.W., 2002, 2005b; Brunn, Watkins, Fargo and Lepawsky, 2005; Edwards, 2005), hybrid natures (Sletto, 2002; Fall, 2005) or post colonial sovereignties (Mbembe, 2000; Kramsch, 2002; Sidaway, 2002; Sparke, Sidaway, Bunnell and Grundy Warr, 2004), borderlands provide usefully prismatic lenses on to the changing geography of power in the context of globalization. ms (NEW PARAGRAPH)