The Dictionary of Human Geography (32 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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contiguous zone
A zone of special jurisdic tional purposes contiguous to the territoriaL (NEW PARAGRAPH) sea, which a coastal state may claim up to 24 nautical miles from the baseline for meas uring the territorial sea. The coastal state may, in such a zone, exercise the control necessary to: (1) prevent infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary Laws and regu lations within its territory or territorial sea; and (2) punish infringement of such laws and regulations committed within its territory and territorial sea (United Nations, 1983, Art. 33). This enables foreign nationals to exercise numerous prerogatives, including rights of navigation, overflying, fishing, conducting research and laying submarine cables. sch (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Valega (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
continental shelf
The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) defines the continental shelf as ?the natural prolongation of the land territory to the outer edge of the continental margin, or to a distance of 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territoriaL sea is measured? (United Nations, 1983, Art. 76). Where the continental margin extends beyond 200 nautical miles from the baseline, the coastal state must establish its outer edge with the highly technical methods stipulated in Article 76 ofthe Convention. The coastal state exercises over the continental shelf ?sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring it and exploiting its natural resources? (United Nations, 1983, Art. 77). sch (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Valega (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
continents
Usually defined as ?large, con tinuous, discrete masses of land?, the identifi cation of continents is both conventional and contingent, because it is closely bound up with the histories of expLoration, geography and geopoLitics. Contemporaries divided the Graeco Roman world into three continents europe, asia and ?Libya? (see africa) but (NEW PARAGRAPH) as early as the fifth century bce Herodotus was puzzled ?why three distinct women?s names should be given to what is really a single landmass? (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, p. 22). In medieval Europe, cosmographers and carto graphers retained this tripartite division but saw the three as parts of a single ?world island?, or Orbis Terrarum. The European ?discovery? of the americas from the late fifteenth century followed by ?the Great Southern Continent? of austraLia in the early seventeenth century Modern continental systems (NEW PARAGRAPH) Antarctica Australia South North Europe Asia Africa (NEW PARAGRAPH) America America (NEW PARAGRAPH) Antarctica Australia South North Eurasia Africa (NEW PARAGRAPH) America America (NEW PARAGRAPH) Antarctica Australia America Eurasia Africa displaced these ethnocentrisms and allowed for a heightened sense of global division and distinction. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In English, the word ?continent' was not used to denote major divisions of the globe until the early seventeenth century. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, those differences were calcified by doctrines of environmental determinism: the continents were distinguished by the supposedly intimate, and even causal, connec tions between their physical and human geog raphies. The categories of the emergent ?continental system' were thus naturalized, ?coming to be regarded not as products of a fallible human imagination but as real entities that had been ??discovered'' through empirical inquiry' (Lewis and Wigen, 1977, p. 30). The arbitrary nature of the continental schema is revealed by the different systems in contemporary use (see table), but while these have little or no scientific merit they nonetheless often retain considerable popular and geopolitical significance. (See also meta geography.) dg (NEW PARAGRAPH)
contrapuntal geographies
The networks through which people and events in different places around the world are connected in a complex, dynamic and uneven web that both maintains their specificity and mobilizes their interactions. Contrapuntal geographies thus reject two conventional prejudices: the uniqueness of place and the universality of space. Places are not closed and self sufficient, but neither is (global) space open and increas ingly self similar. The term derives from the work of Edward Said (1935 2003), a literary critic with a lively geographical imagination. He regarded ?contrapuntal reading' as an indispensable part of cultural critique, and particularly of the critique of colonialism. Said argued that europe and the ?west? more generally relied on a myth of auto genesis (self production) that represented modernity as the unique product of the actions of Europeans, who then had both the right and the responsibility to reach out to bring to others the fruits of progress that would other wise be beyond their grasp. He objected to this not only for its narcissism but also for its essentialism: in his view, all cultures are hybrids, ?contrapuntal ensembles'. This was partly a matter of material fact networks of commodity exchange, of migration and the like and partly a matter of cultural construc tion: ?No identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppo sitions? (Said, 1993, p. 58: see also imagina tive geographies). It was therefore essential to bring these ?overlapping territories [and] intertwined histories' together. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Said was an accomplished musician and his root metaphor was a musical one: ?In the counterpoint of Western classical music, vari ous themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any par ticular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized inter play that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work. In the same way, I believe, we can read and interpret English novels . . . ' (Said, 1993, p. 51). There are three crucial points about such a project as it spirals beyond literary criticism: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Contrapuntal geographies are rarely trans parent and their disclosure requires both theoretical and analytical acuity. Another literary critic, Frederic Jameson, regarded contrapuntal reading as vital to the inter pretation of the colonial world by virtue of ?the systematic occultation of colony from metropolis? but argued that globalization has produced an ?epistemological transpar ency'. This is precisely the universality rejected by Said?s conception (cf. Gregory, 2004b, pp. 11 12). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Contrapuntal geographies may disclose ?concert and order', but this must not be mistaken for harmony or equilibrium: their movements are orchestrated through differential relations of power (see also transculturation). Said?s (1993, p. 279) own account focused on a particular modality of power, by seeing ?Western and non Western experiences as belonging together because they are connected by imperialism'. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Third, contrapuntal geographies require reading from multiple sites and points of view: not only from the point of view of the dominant discourse but also from the perspective of subaltern knowledges (cf. Featherstone, 2005a: see also subal tern studies). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Contrapuntal geographies have been invoked to wire the discourse of terrorism and secur ity mobilized by the USA in its ?war on terror? in Afghanistan and Iraq to heightened Israeli military action in occupied Palestine (Gregory, (NEW PARAGRAPH) and to campaigns by the Hindu Right against Muslims in India (Oza, 2007): like Said's original proposal, both studies revealed the reactivation of colonial tropes to charac terize ?the common enemy'. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Other projects have been directed towards similar ends without invoking Said: Gilroy's (NEW PARAGRAPH) ?Black Atlantic? is one, particularly prominent example of a transnational spatial formation composed through an intricate inter play of connection and diFference. Said him self preferred demonstration to theoretical elaboration, but in human geography there have been several attempts to develop a more insistently materialist theorization of these ideas. Thus Katz (2001a) substituted a carto graphic metaphor a countertopography for Said's musical one: (NEW PARAGRAPH) I want to imagine a politics that maintains the distinctiveness of a place while recogniz ing that it is connected analytically to other places along contour lines that represent not elevation but particular relations to a process (e.g. globalizing capitalist relations of production). This offers a multifaceted way of theorizing the connectedness of vastly different places made artifactually dis crete by virtue of history and geography but which also reproduce themselves differently amidst the common political economic and socio cultural processes they experience. This notion of topography involves a par ticular precision and specificity that connects distant places and in so doing enables the inference of connection in uncharted places in between . . . Such connections are precise analytical relationships not homogenizations. Not all places affected by capital's global ambition are affected the same way . . . The larger intent is to produce countertopographies that link different places analytically and thereby enhance struggles in the name of common interests. (Katz, 2001a, pp. 1229 30) (NEW PARAGRAPH) These geographies are in constant and often disjunctive motion, and Sheppard (2002) borrowed the concept of a wormhole from relativity theory to accentuate the complex topoLogies involved: (NEW PARAGRAPH) The positionaLity of two places should be measured not by the physical distance separating them, but by the intensity and nature of their interconnectedness . . . Like networks, wormholes leapfrog across space, creating topological connections that reduce the separation between distant places and reshape their positionality . . . Wormholes are a structural effect of the long historical geography of globalization, reflective of how globalization processes reshape space/time. The existence of such wormholes may also have highly asymmetric consequences for the places that are connected . . . ' (Sheppard, 2002, pp. 323 4) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Whatever vocabulary is preferred, however, mapping these volatile geographies involves more than a cartography of connections: the implication of differentials and differences in time space is vital (cf. powee geometry). And Said's original metaphor conveys an equally crucial sense of dynamics: of move ment, variation and change. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH)
conurbation
A term coined by Patrick Geddes (1854 1932) to describe a built up area created through the coalescence of two or more once separate settlements, probably initiated through eibbon deveLopment along the main inter urban routes. With greater urban sprawL the term has largely been replaced by terms such as megaLopoLis, met ropoLitan area and metropoLitan laboue area, in which the built up area may be discon tinuous. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
convergence, regional
The tendency for regional incomes or levels of living within a country to become more equal over time. That this should be the case is a prediction derived from neo cLassicaL economics, which portrays labour, capitaL and other fac tors of production moving from one region to another seeking the best possible returns (in the form of wages or profits), until there is nothing to gain from further movement because returns are the same in all regions. Thus a competitive free market economy under capitaLism should tend towards regional equality, subject to constraints on the spatial mobility of factors of production. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Evidence for individual nations shows that this prediction does not necessarily hold true. For example, regional incomes in the USA show steady convergence from the latter part of the nineteenth century up to the 1970s. However, individual regions had their own trajectory, reflecting their historical experience of greater or lesser movement towards the national average income, which complicates a simple picture of regular convergence. In add ition, the convergence thesis depends on the geographical scaLe adopted: the trend towards reduced inequality at a broad regional scale can be contradicted more locally; for example, between core and periphery and within the city. Thus in the USA convergence at a broad regional scale has been accompanied by local divergence between city and countryside and among neighbourhoods. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Regional convergence is not confined to capitalist economies and, indeed, may be more marked under a socialist system that has the equalization of regional living stand ards as an explicit objective. For example, a strong convergence tendency could be observed among the republics of the former Soviet Union, although this may have been reversed during the so called ?era of stagna tion? that preceded perestroika and the eventual collapse of communism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There is evidence also of reversals of conver gence in the capitalist world, including the USA, with inter regional inequality increasing since the 1970s. In the UK, divergence can be observed among regions since the early 1980s, in GDP per capita and other measures of income. The fact that this has ocurred during an era ofdedication to the free market suggests limits to the extent of regional convergence towards perfect equality under capitalism, in practice if not in theory. Indeed, the earlier era of more positive regional pLanning may have taken the country further in the direction of equaLity than would have been the case under less restrained market forces. This sug gests that, after a certain level in the conver gence process has been reached, state intervention in the form of regional policy is a necessary if not sufficient condition for fur ther convergence. dms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Caselli and Coleman (2001); Martin (2001a); Sokol (2001); Williamson (1966). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
co-operative
An enterprise formed by an association of members with the aim of pro moting their common economic interests. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Historically, co operatives have formed to enhance the selling power of independent, family based producers; thus they have been most prevalent in the farming sector (Moran, Blundern and Bradley, 1996). Sellers? co operatives share market and pricing informa tion, and may act as a single seller to secure better prices. The co operative form has also been used to enhance purchasing power (bulk purchases) and to share the costs of food processing. In recent years, producer co operatives have formed hand in glove with fair trade initiatives to improve the working condi tions and income of peasant producers. jgu (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cobia (1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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