The Dictionary of Human Geography (181 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
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section
A territorial division of a country associated with an electoral cleavage created when a political party mobilizes support there based on policies with particular local relevance. The classic sectional cleavage (NEW PARAGRAPH) occurred in the USA, where for most of the century following the Civil War the Democratic party mobilized majority support in the states that had wished to secede, against the Republican party, which granted equality of civil rights to African Americans and ended slavery. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Archer and Taylor (1981). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
sectoral model
A model of residential pat terns developed by Homer Hoyt (1895 1984: see Hoyt, 1939) for US cities, involving the segregation of housing of different quality and value into separate sectors radiating from the city centre along major routeways. Changes in the character of a residential area within a sector involved a filtering process whereby relatively affluent residents moved towards the urban fringe, thereby yielding their homes and neighbourhoods to lower status in migrants (cf. invasion and succession). The model developed for mortgage lending applications was presented as an alternative to the zonal model and was later incorporated with it in a multiple nuclei model (see figure for that entry). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
secularism
An ideology in which religion and supernatural beliefs are not central to understanding the world, both religious beli efs and religious institutions should not inter fere with the public affairs of a society, and are segregated from matters of govern ance. It is often associated with enlighten ment in europe, with its turn towards science and rationalism and its move away from reli gion and superstition. Secularism as a philoso phy owes its origins to George Jacob Holyoake (1860), who introduced the idea that life should be lived by reference to ethical prin ciples, and the world understood by proces ses of reasoning, rather than by reference to God or gods, or other supernatural con cepts. From the perspective of government and governance, secularism refers to a policy that separates religious authority from the state. The opposite of secularism is usually theocracy; that is, where religion has a major role in government. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The secularist movement is split between those who believe that secularism leads logic ally to anti religious propaganda and activ ism, and those who do not. Most modern ?Western? societies today are thought to be secular. Most would have near complete free dom of religion. Religion does not officially dictate political decisions, though it may influence the actions of individual politicians (but see Butler, 2008). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The divergent values of the secular state and religious groups have been a source of signifi cant conflict. The prohibition of headscarves in schools in France is one example. At the same time, different secular states are secular to different extents and in different ways. Thus, while the secular state in France pro hibits headscarves, in Canada, the secular state protects rights to wear religious markers in public schools. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers have mostly been concerned about the intersections of sacred and secular in the landscape, or how sacred and secular ideologies impact on landscapes. Thus, in the ory, a strictly secular ideology that underpins urban planning principles would not support the use of religious principles in the location of religious buildings, for example. However, in reality, different degrees of negotiations between sacred and secular ideologies prevail in most societies (Kong, 1993a,b). lk (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Heelas (1998); Kong (1993a). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
security
Freedom from imagined or real danger in the present or future. Geographical orderings of security are constructed through discourse and performance, and play an important role in constituting political and social geographies at a wide variety of scales. Discourses of security are always highly politi cized and often vigorously contested. They involve the mobilization of imaginative geog raphies that swirl around notions of collective identity to invoke political threats, political change and political violence. As Dalby (2002, pp. 163 4) has suggested: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Security is about the future or fears about the future. It is about contemporary dangers but also thwarting potential future dangers. It is about control, certainty, and predict ability in an uncertain world, and, in attempting to forestall chance and change, it is frequently a violent practice. [Security] is about maintaining certain collective iden tities, certain senses of who we are, of who we intend to remain, more than who we intend to become. Security provides narra tives of danger as the stimulant to collective action but is much less useful in proposing desirable futures. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographies of international relations and the inter state system are overwhelmingly constituted and re made through realist disco urses of national and international security. Through these, nation states have traditionally sought to reify and naturalize their existence as ?security containers? using discourses of ?national security? that depict them as singular actors with incontrovertible national charac teristics, homogenous populations and natural borders (Katzenstein, 1996). Such geopolit ical discussions about national security tend to portray nation states as facing existential threats from the incursions or ambitions of competing states and empires or especially in the post Cold War period from non state terrorist or insurgent groups. The Bush administration?s ?global war on terror?, launched after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, is a dramatic example (Kirsch, 2003). Research within critical geopolitics (O Tuathail, 1996b), critical international relations and security studies (Campbell, 1998) has shown how nationalism, militarism and war are constructed and entangled through the invoca tion of such threats to ?national security?. Imaginative geographies enlisted in the service of security typically represent the homeland as virtuous and righteous whilst simultaneously demonizing the space of the enemy. That space is increasingly seen as transnational and multi dimensional: at once a ?security region? that requires monitoring and surveillance and, in the case of the USA, a unified combatant com mand pre assigned to military intervention there (cf. middle east; Morrissey, 2008b; 2009), and also a complex non linear ?battle space? (see military geography). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These conventional imaginations of national and international security have been sharply criticized for the way in which they legitimize military violence and neglect the environmen tal, social and biophysical underpinnings of the security of all human societies. In a post cold war world dominated by resource depletion, rapid population growth, intensifying urbaniza tion and a series of deepening environmental and ecological crises, all of them compounded by highly uneven configurations of migration, capital investment and environmental risk, Dalby (2002) has called for conventional dis courses of national security to be challenged by broader notions of what he terms environmen tal security. Addressing the ecological founda tions of political, social and economic security, he urges that critical discussions about national security ?need a more explicit engagement with the ecological conditions of contemporary urban existence? (p. 184; see also biosecurity). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The United Nations Development Programme had already (1994) invoked the concept of ?human security? as a universally applicable notion that, crucially, shifts the referent of secur ity studies from nation states to peoples. This move focuses on the prevention and amelior ation of a wide range of risks and hazards facing people in all human societies within what Beck calls a global risk society (Beck, 1998; see also Theranian, 1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH) These proposals are important, but they also collide with a recent stream of work on biopower, if they are understood to imply a transition from geopolitical regimes that take territory as their object to biopolitical regimes that take population as their object. Inspired by Michel Foucault?s lectures in the late 1970s (translated as Foucault, 2007 [2004]), researchers are now asking urgent questions about the biophysical and medica lized vocabularies in which security is being re visioned, and the ways in which governmental technologies of contingency are entering into the very construction of life itself (Dillon, 2008). In one sense, these more recent inter ventions reactivate and radicalize a stream of work on the ways in which hazards, risks and fear intersect in the constitution of everyday life. In major metropolitan centres in the global north and in the global south, the police have become increasingly militarized, and so has architecture to such a degree, indeed, that there is now a critical online ?field guide to military urbanism? (Subtopia, at http://subtopia. blogspot.com: see also (NEW PARAGRAPH) Caldeira, 1999; Low, 2004). The ?securitiza tion? of everyday life has become so com monplace so ?normal? that one of the most popular, and certainly one of the edgiest, magazines on the role of technology in con temporary culture includes regular blogs on national security (Danger Room: http://blog. wired.com/defense) and on privacy, security, politics and crime (Threat Level: http://blog. wired.com/27bstroke6/). This brings us full circle, to a point at which strategic sites in cities are targeted by terrorist groups and these threats are used in turn to legitimate wide spread efforts to securitize cities through install ing checkpoints, defensive urban and landscape designs, and systems of intensified electronic surveillance (Graham, 2004a; Gray and Wyly, 2007; Katz, 2007). sg/Dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bialasiewicz, Campbell, Elden, Graham, Jeffrey and Williams (2007); Dalby (2002). See also Subtopia, at http://subtopia.blogspot.com. (NEW PARAGRAPH)
segregation
The phenomenon of segrega tion is said to occur when two or more groups occupy different spaces within the same city, region or even state. The types of patterns identified as segregated go back to the begin nings of concentrated human settlement. Even ancient cities, for example, were usually div ided internally into quarters associated with particular groups, and also characterized by a sharp separation between urban (inside the wall) and suburban (outside) groups. Human settlements have always been socially stratified and those designated as ?others? whether based upon religion, culture, economic status or any other social division have been rele gated to specific, usually environmentally poor, places (see also other/otherness). That is, social marginalization is almost always associated with spatial segregation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The degree of segregation, or separation between groups, varies. A group may be more prevalent in one area than another: for example, people of a particular religion may have a tendency to live near their place of worship but still live among people of other faiths, so that the degree of segregation is low. At the other end of the spectrum, groups may be pushed into separate areas and have their mobility curtailed, as in the Jewish ghettos created by the Nazis during the holocaust or the segregated districts imposed by the apartheid regime in South Africa. The process is not merely historical: at the end of 2006, for example, several local authorities in Italy decided to designate separ ate spaces for Roma (Gypsy) people, complete with fences and gates regulating movement in and out. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These examples highlight another crucial element: segregation can arise from discrimin atory forces outside a group and/or from the social organization and predilections of the group itself. The internal side of this dynamic was first theorized by the chicago school of urban sociologists, as they tried to understand the nature of immigrant settle ment in early twentieth century cities in the USA. They believed that newcomers gravi tated into enclaves specific to their cultural group and that these segregated areas helped people to come to terms with their new soci ety. Gradually, as individuals adapted to American culture by learning English, upgrading their education and obtaining better jobs, they would move to multi ethnic (non segregated) neighbourhoods, typically in sub urbs (see suburb/anization). Subsequent critics charged that the Chicago School ignored powerful forces of racialization involved in the creation and maintenance of enclaves generally, and that they particularly downplayed the racism that forced African Americans into ghettos. A helpful intervention distinguished between slums, neighbour hoods of poverty, and ghettos, places where racialized groups are trapped in poverty, which is transmitted intergenerationally (Philpott, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Recent social geographers have been far more attentive to the ?constraint? side of segregation, perhaps to the detriment of under standing the degree of social organization within marginalized communities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The consequences of urban ethnic segrega tion have been discussed at length by geog raphers and sociologists. In early statements by the Chicago School, enclaves were deemed beneficial as long as individuals only resided in them temporarily. Further, those who remained in enclaves were seen as insuffi ciently assimilated (see assimilation) and therefore at fault. Since then, assessments have been more complex, with several basic strands of thought. Some continue to see seg regation as indicative of a reluctance to assimi late, and believe that enclaves and ghettos reproduce social exclusion because their inhabitants adopt a ?culture of poverty? asso ciated with laziness, reliance on welfare, and crime (cf. Lewis, 1969a). Another, more crit ical, interpretation focuses on the institutional practices that perpetuate segregation and therefore the harm that it causes (Massey and Denton, 1993). From this point of view, segregated landscapes are both the result of inequality and also a mechanism for the repro duction of inequality. Other scholars have sought to reconcile the classic view of the Chicago School, that residents of segregated areas gain certain benefits, with these later critical perspectives, arguing that segregation can have both beneficial and deleterious effects (Peach, 1996; Logan, Alba and Zhang, 2002). Moreover, planned dispersion of marginalized residents of segregated neigh bourhoods does not necessarily raise their level of opportunity or standard of living (Musterd, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The issue of segregation has become par ticularly charged in europe, where prominent commentators have linked race riots in the UK and France to the effects of segregated urban environments (cf. Amin, 2003; Haddad and Balz, 2006). Those affiliated with the political right see concentrated minority/immigrant neighbourhoods as the result of a deliberate choice made by their inhabitants to embrace cultural isolation, an attempt to lead lives separate from mainstream society (for which the term ?parallel lives? is invoked: Amin, 2002a), while progressive critics believe that segregation is a response to racism and economic marginalization. Regardless, socio spatial segregation is seen as an ingredient in social unrest. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The link between racialization and class division, which is so obvious in the riots just discussed, is generally under theorized in the literature on segregation. To a large degree, this omission reflects another legacy of the Chicago School. Over the past century, in geography at least, studies of segregation have been dominated by a concern for cultural forms of segregation rather than class. However, socio spatial divisions based on class have been equally pervasive, and were first theorized in the mid nineteenth century, as this famous statement by Friedrich Engels testifies: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Every great city has one or more slums, where the working class is crowded to gether.... And the finest part of the arrange ment is this, that the members of [the] money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. (Engels, 1987 [1845], pp. 70, 86) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Arguably, the situation is exactly the opposite in contemporary cities: poverty is exposed, but affluence is hidden behind walls in gated communities, protected by private security systems and electronic surveillance (le Goix, 2005). As in the past, the privileged protect themselves, though the mechanisms of this process, and the detailed spatial patterns that are generated, vary. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Recently, scholars have explored the rela tionship between different forms of segrega tion, such as socio economic class and ethnic origin (Clark and Blue, 2004). Research has also shown the relationship between residen tial segregation and the educational system (Burgess, Wilson and Lupton, 2005; Denton, 1996), and the fact that children raised in highly segregated neighbourhoods experience lasting difficulty as students, even when they are in universities outside their home city (Massey and Fischer, 2006). dh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kaplan (2005); Massey and Denton (1993); Peach (1996c). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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