The Dictionary of Human Geography (186 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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slum
An area of substandard housing and inadequate provision of public utilities (espe cially water and sanitation), inhabited by poor people in high densities, who develop a distinctive culture as a means of both survival and self respect. The term originated in Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Labourers living in the countryside endured wretched conditions too, but the overcrowding of tenements in the central dis tricts of industrial cities the shock cities of the age and of capital cities such as London was symptomatic of the slum. Life in these communities became a central object of social commentary and investigation, in studies such as Engels? Condition of the English working class (1844) and novels such as Dickens? Hard times (1854). Areas of poor housing for poor people had existed in many other periods and places too, from imperial Rome to Georgian Bath, but it was the connection forged between the built environment and the ?moral environ ment? by the close of the century, fears over public order and public health were increas ingly compounded by biopolitical theses of ?urban degeneration? (cf. Luckin, 2006) that was diagnostic of the politics of the slum on both sides of the Atlantic. The connection was both constructed and contested (Ward, 1976), so that slums were not only the product of intersections between housing and (often cas ual) labour markets but also of a particular imaginative geography (Stedman Jones, 1991 [1974]; Mayne, 1993). Their modern analysis has relied on recovering built forms and material cultures, and analysing con temporary photographs and memoirs (Rose, 1997a; Mayne and Murray, 2001; cf. Roberts, 1990). Slums became targets for state inter vention, including social regulation and urban renewal in the nineteenth century one of the objectives of the Haussmannization of Paris and ?slum clearance? schemes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Wohl, 1977; Yelling, 1986, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The political salience of the term has been revived by critics such as Davis (2006), who points to the contemporary transposition of slums from the global north to the global south. Colonial cities were often bipolar, with a cordon sanitaire between the European districts (the ?white city?) and the poor, over crowded ?native city?, but the slum is primarily a product of class zonation rather than the racial discriminations associated with the ghetto. Class distinctions loom large in the rapidly growing cities of the South, and it is estimated that one third of the global urban population now lives in slums, the vast majority of them in the South (Davis, 2006, p. 23). If the overcrowding, poverty, human degradation and exploitation are familiar from older descriptions ?There is nothing in the cata logue of Victorian misery that doesn?t exist somewhere in a Third World City today? (Davis, 2006, p. 186) the immensity of scale is radically new. And unlike the nineteenth century slums of the North, most of these new slums are on the edges of cities (not at the core) and their production is wired to transnational (not national) circuits of capital and to the political economic projects of neo liberalism. Finally, if slums have always been sites for the warehousing of what Marx called a ?surplus army? of labour, the new slums confront real armies who foresee urban warfare swirling around our ?planet of slums? (Davis, 2006, pp. 202 6). Although this dystopian vision is rhetorically powerful, however, it offers a remarkably undifferentiated view of a far more complex urban geography and it overlooks the crucial contribution of progressive urban social movements (Angotti, 2006). Indeed, Roy?s (2003) incisive exposure of the politics of poverty in Calcutta is explicitly staged as ?a satire on the very trope of the dying city? and, like Simone?s (2004) brilliant study of four African cities, is a critique ofthe urban fantasies (and fears) of abjection and failure projected on to cities of the global South by planners and theorists alike, and contained within the very concept of a ?slum?. (See also squatting.) dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Davis (2006); Philpott (1991 [1978]); Ward (1976). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
social area analysis
A theory and related technique for characterizing urban residential neighbourhoods, linking changes in urban social structure to economic development and associated urbanization (termed a society?s ?increasing scale?: Shevky and Bell, 1955). Increasing scale (not to be confused with other uses of that term see scale) involves three interrelated trends: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Changes in the range and intensity of so cial relations produced by greater division of labour and reflected in the distribution of skills and rewards within society this trend was termed social rank or economic status. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Increasing differentiation offunctions within society and its constituent households generating new lifestyles and household forms termed urbanization or family status. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The concentration into cities of people from different cultural backgrounds seg regation or ethnic status. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The link between these three trends and resi dential differentiation was not clear in the ori ginal presentation. Shevky and Bell selected variables to represent the three trends (the percentage in certain occupations for eco nomic status, for example), which were meas ured for the various census tracts in a city and used to produce standardized indices for each tract on each construct. The tracts were then classified into a typology of social areas depending on their values on the three indices. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although the technique was soon super seded by the more inductive approach of factorial ecology, and the theory was largely ignored within urban geography, the three constructs remained central to much analysis of urban residential patterns. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Johnston (1969). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
social capital
The idea that access to and participation in groups can benefit individuals and communities the nub of contempo rary social capital scholarship is a well established sociological insight dating to the nineteenth century writings of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tonnies, among others. The term itself was first invoked (and then only once) by the econo mist Glen Loury in a 1977 article in which he critiqued neo classical theories of racial income inequality. Loury contended that by its commitment to methodological individ ualism, orthodox labour economics was incapable of factoring how social context specifically, poorer connections of young black workers to the labour market and their lack of information about opportunities impeded intergenerational mobility and reproduced race divisions rooted in economic inequality (Loury, 1977). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The sociologist Alejandro Portes (1998) attributes the first theoretically refined analysis of social capital to Pierre Bourdieu, who defined the concept as ?the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition? (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 248). Although Bourdieu?s note, ini tially published in French in 1980, remained neglected within the English speaking world, the concept of social capital proliferated, catalysed by a conjuncture of events. These included the publication of an article in the late 1980s by a leading American sociologist, James Coleman, in which he explored the con nection between aspects of ?social structure? and ?human capital? formation (Coleman, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Although Coleman?s treatment of social capital lacked the rigour of Bourdieu?s formulation, it garnered far more traction. Post 1989 market triumphalism, accompany ing receptivity within and outside academia (e.g. at powerful multinational institutions such as the World Bank) to non dirigiste sources of economic development, and the linked emergence of a ?global civil society? discourse (which conflated ideas offree society and free market) undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of Coleman?s thesis. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Since then, mainstream social science has operationalized the concept of social capital in a bewildering number of ways. The shared impulse has been to parlay culture in a form sensible to economics and policy science. This importation of culture into the economic is sorely inadequate (see cultural economy). Of the three broad categories of empirical approaches currently in vogue, the first evalu ates how social relations might function as collateral or assurance that an economic trans action will occur in the manner anticipated the distilled wisdom here is that social capital in the form of trust minimizes the risks (and, hence, costs) associated with transactions and boosts economic competitiveness. A second approach measures how social capital as density of strong and weak social ties and group membership acts as an insurance mechanism during periods of need or crisis the contention being that social cohesion is positively correl ated with the ability of individuals to shield themselves from idiosyncratic risks. A third approach conceptualizes social capital as a stock of accumulated obligations that can yield economic returns to the individual holder, either on an everyday basis or as investment in social relations with expected returns in the marketplace hence, rendering the cultural into a form that is fungible with the economic. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While Bourdieu also emphasizes the fungi bility of different forms of capital (academic, cultural, social, symbolic) and the reduction of all forms ultimately to economic capital, defined as accumulated human labour, his writing also reveals that ?social capital? relations of abstract trust and reciprocity (dis playing qualities of a quasi public good) that inhere in society and facilitate economic trans actions as a social resource is: (a) a positive externality generated by a large number of individuals able to pursue conduct that they believe, given their semiotic universe, will earn them social distinction; (b) an unintended normative outcome that congeals through a long history of repeated interaction, rather than something that can be purposively manu factured in a relatively short time span (as some policy oriented social theorists and their institutional backers are prone to claim); and (c) always anchored to a place and a commu nity, and as such, containing the potentially coercive elements of social surveillance and pressure to conform, backed by the threats of social exclusion and excommunication (Gidwani, 2002). vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bebbington, Guggenheim, Olson and Woolcock (2004); Portes (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
social construction
The idea that the social context of individuals and groups constructs the reality that they know, rather than an inde pendent material world. Knowledge is always relative to the social setting of the inquirers (cf. relativism), the outcome of an ongoing, dynamic process of fabrication (anti realism). Further, social construction applies as much to forms of specialized understanding (e.g. high energy physics) as it does to everyday, taken for granted knowledge. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Antecedents of social constructionism are found in Plato, but it was Karl Marx (1818 83) who established an intellectual agenda with his claim that the interests of the domin ant social class (the bourgeoisie) shaped indi vidual beliefs (see ideology). Marx (1904, preface) wrote: ?It is not the consciousness of men [sic] that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.? Antonio (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gramsci?s (1891 1937) theory of hegemony developed Marx?s idea by arguing that even seemingly humdrum commonsense thinking was socially produced and, because they could not think otherwise, resulted in the working class consenting to their own domination. But the most direct statement of social con struction was provided in 1966 by two American sociologists, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman. This was significant in two ways. First, it provided a simple and remarkably popular sketch of what they called ?the social construction of reality' (there were more complicated versions: Luckmann was keenly interested in Alfred Schutz?s constitu tive phenomenology and the production of the lifeworld). Second, it located social con struction within the sociology of knowledge. ?Insofar as all human ??knowledge?? is devel oped, transmitted and maintained in social situations,? Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 3) wrote, ?the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the analysis of the social con struction of reality?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Using the example of religion, Berger and Luckmann argued that social interaction, bolstered by associated institutions such as the church, constructs knowledge, taking on causal powers and entering everyday life rou tines. This insight was later applied by science studies to the physical world, nature, rocks and quarks (Pickering, 1984). On the surface, nature appears fixed and constant, to be ?out there?, and not dependent upon social beliefs. But science studies contend that scientific knowledge is no different from any other kind of knowledge. Social context operates by shap ing the scientific techniques, equipment and forms of reasoning used by scientists to erect particular constructions of nature (and link ing with situated knowledge that also emphasizes the world making constructions of scientists and their technology). That scien tific knowledge is socially constructed does not make it wrong, however. What is wrong is belief in a science that escapes the influence of its social setting. Rocks and quarks do not express themselves in their own terms, but only in the terms of the scientists who speak for them, and thus the social worlds that those scientists inhabit. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Social construction has had a diffuse but, in some respects, a widespread influence in human geography. The first engagements with Berger and Luckmann?s theses remained close to their origins in sociology and were confined to their implications for social geography, particularly by those sailing under (NEW PARAGRAPH) the flag of a humanistic geography and inter ested in phenomenoLogy, symbolic interac tionism and the constitution of meanings in the conduct of everyday life. The influence of the sociology of scientific knowledge came to the discipline much later, by which time it was typically associated with postmodernism and post structuraLism. The latter in par ticular introduced the concepts of discourse and performativity, which directed attention to the constitutive, ?world making? effects of the nexus of power, knowledge and prac tice. In this spirit, human geographers have explored constructions of the economy (Barnes, 2005), gender (Pratt, 2004), nature (Castree and Braun, 2001) and sexuality (Brown, 2000), to name but a few. tb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hacking (1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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