Regional Geography (RLE Social Cultural Geography) by Ron Johnston Joost Hauer G. Hoekveld

Author:Ron Johnston, Joost Hauer, G. Hoekveld [Ron Johnston, Joost Hauer, G. Hoekveld]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Human Geography
ISBN: 9781317820604
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

Geography as life support?

Geographers have long argued that the incorporation of space into aspatial social theory undermines many – if not all – of the central assumptions of that theory. This view has been expressed most recently in a particularly dramatic way by David Harvey:

The insertion of concepts of space and space relations, of place, locale, and milieu into any of the various supposedly powerful but spaceless social and theoretic formulations has the awkward habit of paralysing that theory’s central propositions.

This condition is so debilitating that:

Whenever social theorists actively interrogate the meaning of geographical and spatial categories, either they are forced to so many ad hoc adjustments that their theory splinters into incoherency or they are forced to rework very basic propositions.

(Harvey 1985a:xiii)

The implication here is that geography matters, in that it shatters any attempt to understand society in geographical terms. All social theory must be geographical theory because geography shapes human affairs. It is impossible to conceive of social processes which are not socio-geographic processes. So historical materialism, for example, must become historical-geographical materialism.

But this conclusion and what might follow from it are not fully spelled out – at least in my reading of Harvey – and he devotes more attention to the (related) question of the relationship between theory and experience. In short, Harvey, when writing about the practice of social life, reveals an uncertainty about the significance of geography, which is obscured in his more conceptual statements by an apparent confidence in its central importance. Nevertheless, Harvey does suggest that it is not enough merely to consider capitalism in space. The questions of the production of space – ‘how capitalism creates a physical landscape … in its own image’4 which then affects the dynamics of the circulation of capital – and ‘the implications for political consciousness of such processes’ form the more ambitious agenda that is explored in his two-volume ‘historical geography of capitalism’ (Harvey 1985a:xvii, xviii; 1985c).

The notion of the production of space is also taken up by Neil Smith (1986). Space is endowed with significance not because of any intrinsic ontological property but, he argues, because it is the product of socio-economic processes. It is not a ‘dead “factor” but comes alive neither as a separate thing, field nor container but as an integral creation of the material relations of society’ (Smith 1986:92).5 Now, in an argument designed specifically to rebut ‘Space blind reductionism’ (p. 94), this is a curious claim. It puts space in its place, integral to but dependent upon material relations. Nevertheless, ‘the role of geographical space’ (p.88) remains important. Smith suggests that the ‘mix of geographically expanded equalization and sharpened differentiation’ during the world economic crisis ‘represents the real solution adopted by capital’ to the dilemma faced by a capitalism with no more pre-capitalist societies to penetrate. So Smith’s space, like Harvey’s, is active in presenting alternatives and (temporary) solutions to capitalist crisis. He argues that the ‘transformation in the definition of developed and underdeveloped areas’ and the ‘hardened geography of

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