B2 – Big Ideas (Scale & Territory) PDF

Preview

Summary

big ideas...

Description

Contemporary Human Geography B2 – Big Ideas (Scale & Territory) Scale as ‘natural’: a nested hierarchy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Global Continental National Regional Sub-regional Local > the Body

The social construction of scale • • • •

Scales emerge through economic (and other) practices Scales represent stories about the world – told by the powerful Resistant practices can force us to rethink what we mean by scale Scale as glocal: the example of Birmingham (week 0 walks)

Scale does not exist A danger that scale becomes a ‘conceptual given’: towards a new ‘site ontology’ (Marston et al., 2005: 422) • • • •

Emergent sites Events Ordering and duration Effects of event relations may be ‘borders’, ‘channels’, ‘images’...even ‘buildings’  Thus, sites – like spaces – are spatial and temporal

Territory • Spatial exclusions and transgressions (last lecture) • Humans have a ‘natural’ impulse to territoriality (or geographic and political ‘strategy’)

“Territoriality, as a component of power, is not only a means of creating and maintaining order, but is a device to create and maintain much of the geographic context through which we experience the world and give it meaning (Sack, 1986: 219)”. Territoriality as spatiality: social processes like class-based social divisions (Paris’banlieuex) or territoriality as social processes that create places. This may not be ‘positive’ experiences of a place. “Once created, territories become the spatial containers in which people are socialized through various social practices” (Storey, 2008: 400 [Daniels et al., Chapter 19)

Territory: The Nation State What is a ‘Nation State’? (Daniels et al., Ch. 19-20) • • • • • •

National characteristics? Ethnicity? Nations as ‘imagined communities’? Nations and boundaries Material nationalisms There are nations without states Key conclusions:

• • • •

Scales may appear ‘natural’ and nested but may be socially constructed What are the (political) implications of asserting that ‘scale doesn’t exist’? Territories are spatialities: imagined, materialised, bounded and contested Scales and territories are central to understanding identities, divisions, urban processes, global flows...