Globalization

Contrary to much received opinion, globalization—that complex set of often contradictory processes that operate at a transnational scale—has made geographical location more, not less, relevant. As neoliberal capital operates ever more effortlessly on a worldwide stage, small differences among regions become increasingly important. The persistent inequality between the global North and South, that is, the world's economically developed and underdeveloped regions, as well as continuing war and famine have drawn many people's attention to the role of space in perpetuating, and at times challenging, such problems. Moreover, far from simplistic and naive assertions about the [Page l]“death of distance” or the “end of geography,” place has become increasingly central to the behavior of transnational corporations, trade, immigration, tourism, and global financial flows. Discourses of national competitiveness in a global economy thrive as place-centered ways of coping with increasingly mobile capital, which operates on a worldwide scale. Opposition to globalization, including terrorism, has also increased the importance of learning about other cultures. At a moment when more than half the human race lives in cities, questions of how urban areas are interconnected (or not) loom large, as does the need for an understanding of deeply geographical issues such as rural-to-urban migration. Rising inequality worldwide speaks to processes that have disproportionately favored the elites at the expense of the working classes and the poor. For many people, matters of social justice are thus inescapably spatial ones. Increasingly, what happens in one part of the world has important ramifications in other parts—a fundamentally geographic phenomenon. Moreover, globalization itself plays out in different ways in different places, so that the global and the local are deeply entangled with one another.

Contemporary globalization has also undermined commonly held notions of absolute, Euclidean space by forming linkages among disparate producers and consumers intimately connected over vast distances through flows of capital, information, and goods. In generating new landscapes twisted like origami and filled with wormholes, in giving rise to ever-changing patterns of centrality and peripherality, the tsunami of globalized timespace compression has forced many people to recognize that geographies are always and everywhere dynamic, incomplete, forever coming into being, and perpetually in flux. The period of rapid globalization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was accompanied, not coincidentally, by an explosion of theoretical work in human geography, in which the discipline firmly came to view space as a social construction, embedded in its historical context and filled with political and cultural meanings. The relational perspective on the world's landscapes today, which depicts them in terms of flows, rhizomes, and networks, is a far cry from the archaic study of places as discrete, bounded, and isolated and has played a large role in electrifying human geography.

Environmental Destruction

Another patently obvious role that geography plays today concerns the rapidly rising seriousness of global ecological and environmental problems. Issues that once could be understood and contained within relatively localized contexts, such as air or water pollution, are increasingly approachable only on a worldwide basis. Acid rain crosses national borders with ease. The enormous crisis of biodiversity unfolding across the world is inseparable from global patterns of population growth, habitat destruction, deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, and resource consumption. The oceans have been confronted with systematic over-fishing and coastal pollution, including agricultural runoff and chemical spills. As protection and preservation of the environment have risen on the political agenda, geographers’ work in these domains has gained attention accordingly. Hazards, such as the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, have drawn the attention of worldwide audiences. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti triggered a response from millions around the globe. Combating global transmissions of diseases, such as AIDS, entails a geographical understanding of their genesis and diffusion. Limited global supplies of resources, including petroleum, have helped elevate the notion of the limits to growth in popular consciousness.

And of course, looming over all these issues is the dark shadow of global warming: As evidence mounts daily of rapidly melting ice caps and glaciers, of rising sea levels and more extreme weather events, of ecosystems turned upside down overnight and mass extinctions, the origins, impacts, and control of greenhouse gases have become increasingly problematic issues. Because environmental issues are unevenly distributed across space and because geography as a discipline has a long history of investigating humanenvironment interactions, space and spatiality have become crucial dimensions in understanding and tackling these problems.

Geospatial Technologies

Geography and cartography have always been close cousins, and for many people, mapping is their first entry into the world of spatial analysis. As technologies for surveying, mapping, and [Page li]monitoring Earth's surface have proliferated in number, accuracy, and sophistication, geographical awareness about Earth's surface, both popular and academic, has grown correspondingly. Geospatial technologies, including GIS, global positioning systems (GPS), remote sensing, and location-based services, have infiltrated many corners of everyday life. Many cars and cell phones today have them. The enormous flood of data that such techniques have generated have allowed geographers to study the world's social and environmental issues in novel ways, testing models and hypotheses, enhancing forecasting abilities, and attracting widespread attention and enthusiasm. Increasingly, mapping has become not the preserve of an isolated elite group of experts but a popular activity, in which users create their own displays uniquely suited to their own contexts and problems. More people today create, disseminate, and use larger volumes of geographic information than ever before. Novel quantitative approaches (e.g., spatial autocorrelation) have supplemented the ability to understand spatial patterns in new and fecund ways. Indeed, many people would argue that such techniques form the engine that drives the growth of much academic geography. The engagement between human geographers and practitioners of GIS has opened fertile new fields to explore, including neogeography, humanistic GIS, and Web 2.0 mashups.

Cyberspace

Finally, the rise of cyberspace and the Internet has also elevated issues of spatiality in several ways. The Internet, an unregulated electronic network connecting an estimated 1.7 billion people (or 26% of the planet) in 2009, allows users to transcend distance virtually instantaneously. Telecommunications systems have become the central technology of postmodern capitalism, vital not only to corporations but also to individual consumption, communication, entertainment, education, politics, and numerous other domains of social life. As Internet usage becomes more popular and widespread in nature, including diverse applications such as e-mail, online shopping, banking, airline and hotel reservations, multiplayer video games, electronic job searches, instant messaging, e-marketing, chat rooms, VOIP telephony, distance education, downloading of music and television shows, digital pornography, blogs, YouTube and MySpace, and simply “Googling” of information, cyberspace has profound effects on social relations, everyday lives, culture, politics, and many other spheres of social activity. Indeed, for many people who spend a great deal of time in the digital world, cyberspace has become such an important part of everyday life that the once solid boundary between the real and the virtual has essentially dissolved: It is difficult today to tell where one ends and the other begins. In allowing people and firms to “jump scale,” to connect effortlessly with others around the world at the click of a mouse, cyberspace has been instrumental in the production of complex, fragmented, jumbled spaces of postmodernity.

There are, of course, many other reasons why geography remains important. Shortages of resources including water as well as a dwindling oil supply have intensified competition for the remaining stocks. The world's oceans are being emptied of their food reserves and are suffering ecosystem collapse at dizzying rates. Massive, ongoing technological changes have led to a proliferation of new industries, occupations, and products, even as old ones disappear. Knowing where one is located is vital to knowing one's identity, and as spaces have been reconfigured, so, too, have individual and collective notions of self and the other. Poverty-stricken populations the world over have spoken out against the causes of their oppression and made their voices heard. Concerns over distant strangers have multiplied as geographical imaginations have expanded in the face of rising long-distance social and personal relations and media coverage. In short, in a world in which the future arrives all too soon, whenever larger numbers of people must daily contend with questions of difference, when nature repeatedly inserts itself into the news, matters of geography have become not a luxury but a necessity.

Space as a Biophysical Landscape

Space as the biophysical surface of the Earth is one such dimension. For physical geographers, Earth's surface has traditionally been seen as a set of atmospheric, hydrologic, biological, and geomorphologic processes. Biogeographers focus on the spatial distribution of life forms, as evolutionary forces have generated webs of ecological relations that vary enormously over time and space. Many physical geographers traditionally paid little attention to human dynamics and often felt that they had more in common with their intellectual brethren in geology, biology, or meteorology than they did with fellow geographers. Conversely, for many human geographers, the natural environment has amounted, at best, to a set of resources. However, the schism between physical and human geography is gradually closing, and increasingly, physical geographers have come to recognize that social activities must be taken seriously, just as many human geographers have slowly come to see that social relations do not simply unfold over a blank surface but are intensely wrapped up with a complicated natural terrain that exhibits a complex logic in its own right. Just as human geographers have grudgingly come to accept that the biophysical world does play an important role in shaping the distributions of human activity, so too have many physical geographers gradually acknowledged that nature does not simply exist outside society but is shaped by human beings and given meaning only within a variety of social contexts.

Space as Places That People Create and Inhabit

A second way in which space may be approached is as a set of places that people create and inhabit. Human geography—the analysis of how societies are stretched over Earth's surface—is thus the study of people in space in much the same way as history views people in time. Indeed, because space and time are inseparable, historical and geographical analyses are necessarily fused. Thus, human geography includes the study of how societies construct places, how different types of activities (cultural, economic, and political) are differentially located and connected, and how all these constantly change, with important ramifications for their inhabitants’ quality of life. Regional geographers have long been interested in the specific conjunctions of processes in individual locales, and the creative tension between understanding the unique and the general continues to reverberate throughout the discipline, as it has for centuries. The generation and transformation of human geographies occur at a variety of spatial scales, and scale has become important not only to cartographers but also to those seeking to understand how different social processes play out at different scales, ranging from the local to the global. Indeed, scale itself has widely become viewed as a human product. Some geographers focus on the most personal and intimate of scales, the body: While bodies appear as “natural,” or given, human geographers view them as social constructions, filled with gendered, racialized, and other meanings. Increasingly, as globalization has linked the planet's diverse societies into an increasingly integrated totality, it has become impossible to separate the local from the global. Integral to this perspective are questions regarding how people use the surface of the Earth, modify it, and in turn are affected by it. The interrelations between people and nature are a longstanding and hugely important part of the discipline. As the ties between human and physical geography have grown, many have rejected the long-standing notion that nature lies “outside” social relations; rather, everywhere, nature has been changed by people and been given meaning by them, even as it changes societies, a notion well encapsulated by relatively recent approaches such as political ecology.

Space as Representation of Earth's Surface

Third, space exists as a set of representations of Earth's surface, the most literal meaning of geo-graph. Geography is concerned with much more than the tangible worlds of mountains or factories, rivers or farms; it also includes the study of how people bring the world into consciousness, make sense of it, and give it meaning. Cartography, for example, is perhaps the most common way in which geographical knowledge has been constructed throughout its history. Maps of one form or another date back deep into human prehistory, when hunters and gatherers formed their own symbolic geographies. Voluminous, [Page liii]detailed, often encyclopedic descriptions of the locations of places are another form of geographical representation.

Shortly after World War II, many geographers adopted the scientific method; using quantitative techniques, they initiated a tradition of modeling space that continues to this day. Geographical models take a diversity of forms and serve many different purposes, ranging from traffic planning to watershed analysis. Models are central to many academic and nonacademic applications of geography, as they simplify the dynamics of the world to reveal its causal properties. This tradition was greatly assisted by the rise of GIS, which allow for the integration and analysis of diverse forms of spatial information. Often integrated with remotely sensed high-altitude or satellite photography, GIS has become a hugely popular, powerful, and important part of the discipline.

In stark contrast, other geographers approached the question of spatial representation in a dramatically different way. The behavioral tradition explored mental maps and cognitive models of space. Humanistic geographers, drawing on a rich philosophical tradition of existentialism and phenomenology, are concerned with the textures of human experience, the role of language and discourse, and how individual understandings are wrapped up with social configurations of power and knowledge. Discourse analysis, which lies at the core of contemporary poststructuralist approaches, insists that geographic knowledges are always social in origin and social in consequence and thus inevitably linked to power interests.