The Dictionary of Human Geography (23 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
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children
A burgeoning area of scholarship in human geography that encompasses notions of children as active producers of space, as geographical subjects and as envir onmental agents, at the same time as it recog nizes children?s limited mobiLity, the peculiarities of their exposure to various envir onmental degradations and hazards, and the mediated nature of their spatial engagements. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The earliest work in the field, pioneered by James Blaut and the psychologist David Stea, addressed the ?ontogeny of environmental behavior? by looking at children?s geographical learning, especially their understandings of spatial relationships, mapping skills and pLace knowledge (Blaut and Stea, 1971, p. 387). Their Place Perception Project (1968 71) spurred much generative work in the field, including Roger Hart?s (1979) landmark study of children?s place experience, Denis Wood?s fascinating research on the relationship between young people?s spatial behaviour and their cognitive maps, and research on such issues as children?s differentiated access to the outdoor environment or ?home range,? their understanding of environmental processes and human environment interactions, and their ability to negotiate aerial photographs. At about the same time as Blaut, Stea and their colleagues at Clark University were researching children?s acquisition of environ mental knowledge, William Bunge (see Bunge et al., 1971) was launching the Detroit Geographical Expedition, which examined the effects of noxious and deteriorated envi ronments on children?s well being, and devel oped projects of environmental activism around the uneven geographies of people?s everyday lives and children?s exposure to problems rooted in these geographies. These two streams of work not, coincidentally, by radical geographers set the stage for much subsequent scholarship on children?s geographies and the geographies of children, even as some of their key practitioners were marginalized from the field. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As geographers have continued to address the development of spatial cognition, mapping skills and environmental learning, there has been an ongoing debate about whether map ping represents a cultural universal that chil dren share from earliest childhood, as Blaut and Stea and their colleagues have argued, or is dependent on cognitive development, as Roger Downs, Lynn Liben and their colleagues have argued. While much of this debate has concerned children?s relative pre paredness for acquiring spatial concepts and mapping skills (and thus was an argument about the role of geographical education at different ages), it was animated by the princi pals? understandings of the nature of Piagetian developmental psychology and what Blaut considered its ideaList underpinnings. Both sides recognized children?s embrace of geo graphical concepts, and advocated their being taught mapping and spatial skills in all phases of their education, agreeing that it would not only be a cornerstone of enhanced geographic literacy but contribute to cognitive develop ment and learning in other arenas (Blaut, 1997; Liben and Downs, 1997; cf. Matthews, 1992). Despite this conclusion and the dec ades of scholarship that support it, there remains a surprising disconnection between the work of scholars interested in geographical or environmental education and those who look at children?s place experience and their acquisition of environmental knowledge and spatial skills. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Work on children?s geographies has been developmental, ecological, milieu focused, comparative and concerned mostly with the global North. As the field evolved, its concerns expanded to include children?s understanding and experience of place (Hart, 1979; Matthews, 1992; Wood and Beck, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , their knowledge of environmental pro cesses and human environment relations (Kates and Katz, 1977; Hart, 1997; Katz, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , the social ecologies of their environmen tal interactions (Ruddick, 1996; Valentine, 1997; Aitken, 2001) and studies of particular children?s environments, such as playgrounds, schools, parks and neighbourhoods (e.g. Skelton and Valentine, 1998; McKendrick, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . In tandem with broader disciplinary concerns, research focused on children and geography has shifted to address new arenas of experience and has recognized the socially constructed nature of childhood. Recent work has examined children and the electronic environment (Holloway and Valentine, 2000); children as environmentalists (Hart, 1997; Holloway and Valentine, 2000); aspects of place experience, such as fear, constriction and surveiLLance, which have peculiar ram ifications for young people (Valentine, 1997; Katz, 2005; Pain, Grundy, Gill et al., 2005); the emotionaL geographies of youth and childhood; identity formation and issues of difference; landscapes of consumption; and questions of youth participation and rights (Hart, 1997). A growing number of geograph ers are attending to children's geographies in the global south and addressing the questions of difference that they raise (Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Katz, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In geography as in other disciplines associ ated with the ?new social studies of childhood,? children are recognized as suBjects and social actors in their own right at the same time as they are both becoming something else and subject to structural forces beyond their con trol. Children and young people are seen to shape their own and others' lives, the sociaL formations in which they live and the social construction of childhood itself. While chil dren's experiences are often cast in relation to adults, geographers and others are clear that age and Life course are not the only differ ences that structure young people's experi ences. Geographers examine how differences of gender, cLass, nation, race, embodied ness and sexuaLity separately and in conjunc ture affect young people's experiences and understandings of the world (Skelton and Valentine, 1998; Holloway and Valentine, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Childhood is now recognized as a sociaL construction that varies historically and geographically, and scholars seek to understand it for itself rather than as a stage on the road to adulthood. If research only recently moved away from the latter perspec tive and its focus on the practices and pro cesses of socialization, it has long been the case that scholarship on children's geographies has treated children methodologically as social actors rather than as objects of learning or vessels for knowledge. This perspective can be readily seen in the methodoLogies adopted and invented for studying children's geog raphies. Beginning with the early work of Blaut and Stea and their students and col leagues, children have been asked to navigate actual and representational geographies, make maps, engage in landscape modelling, enact ?geodramas', take photographs and make fiLms, keep journals, write narratives, lead walks and more recently shape the research itself. These strategies have long complemen ted research methods such as surveys, inter views, participant oBservation and the like in children's geographies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the past decade, children's geographies has been recognized as a vibrant sub field of the discipline. This achievement was marked by the inauguration of an international jour nal, Children?s Geographies, the online revival of the Children?s Environments Quarterly as CYE (Children, Youth, and Environments), the establishment of an IBG/RGS Working Group on the geographies of children, youth and fam ilies; the publication of a number of edited collections (e.g. Skelton and Valentine, 1998; Holloway and Valentine, 2000) and mono graphs (e.g. Matthews, 1992; Ruddick, 1996; Aitken, 2001; Katz, 2004); and the prolifer ation of specialized international workshops, conferences and special sessions at geography meetings. Perhaps the significance of this sub field to the broader discipline, as much as its own ?coming of age', can best be seen in how a growing number of geographers have refracted issues such as gLoBaLization, gentrification, migration or homeLessness, and theoretical constructs such as scaLe, sociaL reproduction or the production of space through the lens of childhood and youth (e.g. Ruddick, 1996, 2003; Katz, 2004). ck (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Holloway and Valentine (2000); McKendrick (2000, 2004); Skelton and Valentine (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Chinatown
Chinese peoples living in cities beyond China have formed compact and comparatively exclusive settlements known as Chinatowns, in which they have resided, worked and traded (Benton and Gomez, 2003). Following the classic ideaL type Chinatown formulated by Lawrence Crissman (1967) based on studies of Chinese societies in South East Asia and North America, scholars of the overseas Chinese such as William Skinner and Wang Gungwu have portrayed Chinatown as an extension of homeLand practices, where principles of social organization based on descent, locality and occupation that had ordered rural life in China were transplanted to overseas urban set tings. In many countries, Chinatown demog raphy was fuelled by an initial phase taking place during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries characterized by either indentured labour systems or kinship based chain migration (predominantly of men), followed by a post Second World War phase during which a ?bachelor society' was gradually transformed by the presence of more female migrants and family immigration (Chen, 1992; Benton and Gomez, 2003). Largely self organizing entities, socio political life and the provision of cradle to grave services in these transplanted communities were anchored, to different extents in different communities, by Chinese associations based on clan, surname, dialect or provenance. Portrayed as an immi grant neighbourhood or an ethnic enclave, Chinatown is identified as a reception area for newcomers, an agglomeration of ethnic busi nesses (including ?illegal' or ?immoral' prac tices such as drug trafficking, gambling and prostitution) serving its ?own kind', and the focal point of a well knit community in a foreign land. The Chinatown depicted in this vein is essentially an outpost of a foreign coun try, comprising a diaspora of unassimilable foreigners. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Recent scholarship has challenged our understanding of Chinatown in at least three ways. First, Chinatown is not just an exported structure, but the product of host society recep tion, including colonial labour policies in some instances and racial discriminatory and discur sive practices more generally. In colonial cities of South East Asia, Chinatown as a racial cat egorization and spatial container to accommo date the Chinese emerged as part of colonial urban planning, and often featured in colonial discourses as a landscape of filth, pestilence and moray decay (Yeoh and Kong, 1994). In Western contexts, by placing the idea of Chinatown at the centre of race definition processes, Anderson (1987, p. 581) argues that ?Chinatown is a social construction with a cul tural history and a tradition of imagery and institutional practice that has given it a cogni tive and material reality in and for the West.? More than a place name or a social commu nity, Chinatown is also part of the imaginative geographies underpinning white European cultural hegemony (see Chinatown). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Second, using Chinatown as a spatial refer ence for an essentialized Chinese identity or ?chopsticks culture' fails to recognize differ ences of class, sub ethnic affiliation and cul tural history among members of Chinese communities. Social and economic mobility, generational change and the influx of later arrivals from different parts of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other (NEW PARAGRAPH) Chinese communities have transformed closed social structures and introduced diversity in terms of class, occupations, educational backgrounds, political affiliations and even ethnic consciousness among those identified with Chinatown (Chen, 1992; Kwong, 2001; Christiansen, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Third, against portrayals of Chinatown as an enclave economy that defies integration into the mainstream, Zhou (1992) argues that immigrant Chinese in Chinatowns in the US context are able to draw upon social capital and networks to surmount structural barriers and facilitate socio economic mobility. From this perspective, Chinatown as an ethnic enclave provides a mechanism for eventual immigrant incorporation into mainstream society. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Chinatown landscapes are also increasingly revitalized for the purposes of heritage tour ism or promoted as gentrified, conservation settings to enhance urban aesthetics in global izing cities. Along with other ethnic neigh bourhoods ranging from Koreatown to Little India, Chinatown as the inscription of race in place has continued to evolve in tandem not only with immigration dynamics but with the politics of place. by (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Anderson (1992); Yeoh and Kong (1994); Zhou (NEW PARAGRAPH) (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
chorology/chorography
The study of the variation in the Earth's surface from place to place (see also areal differentiation). Chorology represents the oldest tradition of Western geographical enquiry. It was first codified by Hecataeus of Miletus in the sixth century bce and systematized by Strabo in the seventeen books of his Geography, probably written between ad 18 and 24. The geog rapher, he wrote, is ?the person who attempts to describe the parts of the earth? (in Greek, chorographein). The two key words were ?describe' and ?parts': in effect, Strabo was recommending what would now be called regional geography as the core of geograph ical reflection. He was not interested in chor ography for its own sake, but intended it to serve a higher purpose. The production of geographical knowledge was an indispensable complement to political and moral philoso phy, because it provided a material ground for understanding truth, nobility and virtue. For this reason, Strabo's geography was funda mentally concerned with human activities. It was also directed towards political and social ends, and paid considerable attention to the interests of the political ruler and the military commander. Although Strabo was born in Greece, he enjoyed the patronage of Augustus and did most of his work in Rome, so that his Geography can be read as an attempt to explain the post Republican world (the inhabited world, or ecume^) to the citizens of the new Roman Empire (Dueck, 2000). Chorography was not supposed to provide a comprehensive gazeteer or regional inventory: it was partial and purposive, and Strabo focused on Rome and began with europe because ?it is admirably adapted by nature for the develop ment of excellence in men and governments? (vanPaassen, 1957, pp. 1 32). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Strabo?s conception of geography was chal lenged by Claudius Ptolemaeus (or Ptolemy) round about ad 150. In his view, the purpose of geography was to provide ?a view of the whole head? and this meant that he separated geography from chorography, which had the purpose ?of describing the parts, as if one were to draw only an ear or an eye?. As this passage implies, for Ptolemy, graphein did not mean describing but drawing and, specifically, map ping. Ptolemy?s ?geography? was geodesy and cartography, and he preferred to leave out everything that had no direct connection with that aim: ?We shall expand our ??guide?? for so far as this is useful for the knowledge of the location of places and their setting upon the map, but we shall leave out of consideration all the many details about the peculiarities of the peoples? (van Paassen, 1957, p. 2). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The distance between Strabo and Ptolemy could not be plainer, and it is indelibly present in the modern constitution of geography too. As late as the seventeenth century, Strabo and Ptolemy continued to provide the main models for European geography. The usual distinction was between a Special Geography, devoted to a description of particular regions, and a General Geography, mathematically oriented and concerned with the globe as a whole. The premier illustration is the work of Bernhard Varenius, who published both studies in Special Geography and his famous Geographia generalis, in which, for the first time, geography sought to engage with the ideas of Bacon, Descartes and Galileo (Bowen, 1981). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The modern case for geography as chorology was argued most forcefully by Hartshorne (1939), and following the subsequent debate over exceptionaLism in geography and despite the nuances and qualifications that Hartshorne had registered chorology was often used in polemical opposition to spatiaL (NEW PARAGRAPH) science (cf. Sack, 1974a). But the temper of the original version, with its acknowledgement of the importance of power and philosophical reflection (cf. Casey, 2001, p. 683), is a force ful reminder of the continuing need to attend to the politics of geographical enquiry, while Koelsch (2004) has insisted that contempor ary attempts to understand the heterogeneous geography of the world still have much to learn from ?the place based, cultural historical model? of Strabo. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Koelsch (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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