The Dictionary of Human Geography (24 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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choropleth
A map that portrays a single distribution for census tracts, counties or similar areal units; portrays each areal unit as homogeneous; divides the data into discrete categories; and typically describes spatial variation of intensity data with a darker means more sequence of greytones. Readily rendered by mapping software, choropleth maps can present misleading patterns when based on count data, highly heterogeneous areal units, inappropriate cLass intervaLs or illogical sequences of colours (Brewer and Pickle, 2002; Monmonier, 2005). Although most choropleth maps depict quantitative distributions such as median income or the percentage rate of population growth, qualita tive choropleth maps are useful for showing distributions such as dominant religion or form of government. mm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading Monmonier (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
chronotope
Translated as ?time space? from its origins in Greek, the term is used to desig nate the spatio temporal contexts and categor ies embedded within a text or other cultural artefact. The term was devised by Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 1975) in the 1920s, partly influenced by the revolutionary transform ation of physics by Einstein, Planck and others, and it was subsequently imported into literary history and cultural studies. In the most general terms, the idea of a chronotope acknowledges the inseparability of time and space while deploying their unity to material ize concrete cultural formations. It is perhaps best to think of a chronotope as a kind of matrix that allows cultural analysts to situ ate a work within its historico geographical setting in order to facilitate its interpretation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bakhtin (1984, p. 246) offered the concrete example of the French literary salon as a key nineteenth century chronotope, ?where the major spatial and temporal sequences of the novel intersect' in the works of Balzac and Stendhal. Not surprisingly, the term has been influential in theatre studies, with the stage providing an intuitive location for the observa tion of chronotopes in action, and theories of performance have developed these imma nently geographical tropes still further by insisting on the contextual boundedness of human actions. In human geography, Folch Serra (1990) proposed a dialogical con ception of Landscape that derived directly from Bakhtin and promised to reconstruct the power laden interactions ?that alternately ??anchor'' and destabilize the ??natural har mony?? of a region?. This focus on the narration of landscape resurfaces in interdisciplinary studies of landscape and identity (Lehman, 1998), but the sense of diversity, dialogue and disputation that is crucial for any Bakhtinian approach is best exemplified by O'Reilly's (NEW PARAGRAPH) study of the unfolding micropolitical relations between competing voices and the co production of gendered time spaces of par ticipation in development projects in North India. As she shows, and as the concept of a chronotope strongly suggests, struggles over meaning are also and reciprocally struggles over the production of distinctive time spaces. us (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Holloway and Kneale (1999); O?Reilly (2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
citizenship
The rights and duties relating to an individual's membership in a political community. In the past several centuries, the boundary of this community has been the nation state and membership has implied some degree of integration into a common national heritage. In its early formulations, however, citizenship was understood as a set of rights and freedoms located primarily at the local scale. The expansion of individual freedoms (such as the right to work and habeas corpus) into a national institution was one of the key components of the growth of modern citizenship. It reflected a shift from local, com munal relations and social rights rooted in village membership into a sense of a national community and of individual rights guaran teed by a state. This shift in scale from the local to the national and from communally sanctioned rights to those protected by the state is an absolutely fundamental aspect of modern citizenship, and one that is profoundly intertwined with the growth of industrial capitaLism, LiBeraLism and mod erOTty in the West (Weber, 1978 [1922]; Turner, 1993; Marston and Mitchell, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) As it has developed in British and North American societies, citizenship owes its mod ern legacy to a succession of legal and political rights and responsibilities originating in Britain mainly in the seventeenth century and continuing through to the present. According to T.H. Marshall, citizenship can be usefully periodized in terms of: (a) the eighteenth century development of civil citizenship, which encompasses civil and legal rights, especially property rights; (b) the nine teenth century expansion of political citizen ship, which involves the rights to vote, to associate and to participate in government; and (c) the rise of twentieth century social citi zenship, which involves entitlements such as provisions for health, housing and education (see Mann, 1987, p. 339; Marshall and Bottomore, 1992). Marshall envisioned a con tinuous positive trajectory for citizenship in terms of the ongoing inclusiveness and expan sion of universal rights, as well as the evolution of those forms of state welfarism (social citi zenship) that guaranteed all members the chance to access those rights and participate in the politics of the community. Although his framework remains influential, Marshall has been criticized for his lack of attention to the experiences of women (Vogel, 1994; Walby, 1994), for the linear and evolutionary qualities of his model (Giddens, 1982), and for his unquestioned liberal assumptions relating to the positive integrative capacity of citizenship itself (see LiBeraLism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Like many mid twentieth century liberals, Marshall was a strong nationalist who concep tualized citizenship as corresponding with a specific state territory and as fundamentally linked with its economic development and cultural narratives. For him and many others, citizenship necessarily assumed both a sense of belonging and identity rooted in a shared national past and a commitment to the pro duction and defence of its territorial borders. Over the past few decades, however, these types of assumptions have been overturned. As a result of the powerful new forces of gLoB aLization and transnationaLism, both the national narratives of heritage and community and the state's discrete and autonomous juris diction over territory and population have been called into question. One of the many new kinds of tensions that have erupted in this period involves the meaning and practices of contemporary citizenship. (NEW PARAGRAPH) With the ever increasing volume and speed of the flows characteristic of globalization, including those of trade, finance, commod ities, information, ideas, culture and human beings, the ability of state actors to control and regulate border crossings and their increasingly mobile populations has greatly diminished. At the same time, most states have maintained various kinds of power through new types of geopolitical alliances, new forms of disciplining and regulation of people across borders, and the development of new transnational or supranational institu tions and practices of rule. In all of these assemblages of power, the meaning, status and practice of citizenship has remained a cru cial and much sought after prize, and it has been at the centre of multiple hegemonic struggles worldwide over the past two decades. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The scholarship on citizenship has bur geoned over the same time period, with hun dreds of titles on different forms of citizenship, such as post national, transnational, dual and multicultural. Those with an empirical bent have tracked the transformations in citizenship law in different national sites over this period and/or the numbers of immigrants or denizens who have become citizens, or whose status or benefits or rights have changed. Those leaning towards post structuralism have written about the cultural qualities of contemporary citizenship, emphasizing in particular its multi layered nature and/or the ways in which belonging and identity are morphing into something quite different from earlier nation based understandings and assumptions. Many have also remarked on the different scales of citizenship, from supra national (e.g. the EU) to sub national (e.g. Basque) citizenship pos sibilities. Soysal (1994) argues that the devel opment of both of these forms manifests the declining importance of national citizenship and the rise of new forms of post national membership in europe. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Almost all current scholarship engages with citizenship as a constantly evolving, non linear formation that is tied to the development of modern nation states as well as to the evolu tion of contemporary economic systems. In the west, it is inevitably interrelated with the form and logic of capitalist development. This said, it should be noted that the ways in which citizenship takes shape at different his torical periods and in different places always reflect the actions of those to whom its transformation matters. State and economic (NEW PARAGRAPH) restructuring responding to civic or popular action whether it is of resistance or accom modation shifts the terrain of rights, respon sibilities and belonging on which citizenship is based, leading inexorably to new formations through time. km (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Castles and Davidson (2000); Hall and Held (1989); Turner (1986). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
city
The etymological roots of the term lie in the Latin civitas; it is related to the Greek polis, the Latin urbs, the French la cite, la ville, the Italian la citta and the German die Stadt. Today, a more generic usage of the term refers to an urban demographic, economic and above all political and jurisdictional unit, usually bigger than a town. In the USA, cities are considered to have self government gran ted by the states. In Canada, where municipal autonomy is more restricted, cities are under the constitutional jurisdiction of provinces. In the UK, reference is to a large town that has received title from the Crown. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cities are usually trading centres and mar ketplaces. Their emergence is linked to the historical separation of non agricultural work from the land (see urban origins). Ancient cities in the Indus valley, in Mesopotamia, Egypt and China were based on a hydrological agricultural economy, and were the seats of religious and military power, and the state. The built environment developed around a temple or ziggurat, and was walled for defence and internal control of the population. In ancient Greece and Rome, city states (Athens, Rome) were cores of larger empires (Mumford, 1961; Benevolo, 1980). Medieval cities in Europe are often seen as the Western archetype of urban socio spatial organization and the core of an urban based network of trade systems (e.g. the German Hansa). During that period, cities were municipal cor porations of free citizens embedded in usu ally feudal larger territorial units. Cities were seats of church power and of the emerging bourgeoisie, as well as the tightly organized artisan trades. Many cities became the loca tion of the first universities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Today's most common image of cities is influenced by the industrial age. The industrial revolution led to the large scale demographic concentration of working class populations around manufacturing plants or industrial complexes, and housed in the typical tenement and rowhouse settlements of the nineteenth century city. Industrial core regions such as the British Midlands or the German Ruhr area became sites of rapid urbanization, creating regional agglomer ations of industrial cities. In the USA, Chicago stands in as the prototypical indus trial city that grew explosively around the turn of the twentieth century. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Improved transportation allowed longer commuter distances and suburbanization at the beginning of the twentieth century. The planned suburbanization and automobiliza tion, as well as functional separation of land uses in particular, were ultimately considered a major contributor to the ?fall? of the modern city (Jacobs, 1992 [1961]; see suburb). The twentieth century saw metropolitanization and the rise of the megalopolis, a supercity stretching across several urban areas. City life now encompasses most areas of society as ?urbanism as a way of life? (see urbanism) becomes pervasive. post industrial cities now characterize most Western nations, as industries first moved to suburban locations and then to developing countries where as in Korea, Brazil or China renewed waves of urbanization and industrialization seem to repeat the history of the industrial city in Europe and North America. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the global south, cities have often grown from colonial outposts into global trading centres (Hong Kong and Singapore). In Africa, Asia and Latin America today, cities grow dramatically, often largely on the basis of large scale squatter settlements (see squat ting) and informal urbanization. Cities have recently enjoyed renewed attention as a post Westphalian system of global governance has restructured the role of nation states, and as new types of global cities and megacities have begun to exert territorial, economic and political power at a global scale. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The city has been the object of much scholarly debate in geography and the social sciences. As David Harvey (1973, p. 196) has noted: ?Urbanism may be regarded as a par ticular form or patterning of the social process. This process unfolds in a spatially structured environment created by man [sic]. The city can therefore be regarded as a tangible, built environment an environment which is a social product.? Urban theory of the twentieth century, strongly influenced by the work of German sociologist Max Weber (1958 [1921]) and the chicago schooL of sociology (Park, Burgess and McKenzie, 1925; Wirth, 1938), tended to fetishize the city spatially as something that appeared distinct from society. Neo Marxist and neo Weberian critiques led to a new phase of studying the city in the 1960s and 1970s (Castells, 1972; Harvey, 1973; Smith, 1979b; Saunders, 1986; Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]), pointing to the notion that the modern city is an economic or admin istrative part of capitalist society and cannot be studied in separation from it. Castells influ entially defined the city as the site of collect ive consumption and a site for sociaL movement mobilization (Castells, 1972, 1983). A related strand of thought redefined the city as a product ofurban growth machines and governing regimes interested in the increase in property values (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s ?the city? often became synonymous with the site of social crisis, pathology and delinquency, the postmodern turn in geog raphy and urban studies reinvigorated the dis cussion on the city in the 1990s, as Los Angeles was temporarily viewed as the new ?Chicago?: a distinct and pervasive model of urbanization in a globalized capitalist system (Scott and Soja, 1996; Dear, 2002; see post modernism). As China?s cities grow in size and significance as global players, they have become the focus of increased attention at the beginning of the twenty first century, while the sprawling megacities of the global South are considered to be on a trajectory different from the ones in the West and in the North. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although the death of the city had been predicted as a consequence of the develop ment of transportation and information tech nologies that allegedly make aggLomeration less necessary and less likely, the opposite has occurred in the past decade: economic power has been re concentrated in cities as a new wave of re centralization of people and eco nomic activities has led to a ?fifth migration? to urban centres (Fishman, 2005). Much of this had to do with a distinct process of ?metropolitanization?, a state growth strategy that concentrates specifically on cities. As a consequence, cities have been rediscovered as the site of ?creative industries?, but also as the contested space of social struggles, gentrification and displacement. rk (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Amin and Thrift (2002); Harvey (1989c); LeGales (2002); Parker (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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