GLOBAL STUDIES 490

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GLOBAL STUDIES 490

• AGENDA FOR TODAY
• Any more scheduling?
• Issue of when we end class
• More book reports
• Rest of Chapter 2 and first half of Chapter 3 of
  Cresswell

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The First Part of Chapter 3

• We're ahead of where the syllabus says we should
  be, but once we get into the presentations it
  will be hard to have enough time to discuss the
  book.
• This part of the chapter (pp. 53 to 63) sets up
  the rest of the chapter for the reprinting,
  almost in its entirety, of Doreen Massey's very
  influential essay, A Global Sense of Place.
• Massey moves the focus away from 'roots' to
  'routes,' suggesting that sense of place and
  mobility/ porousness are not mutually exclusive.

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The First Part of Chapter 3

• The context for this is the concern expressed by
  many that homogenization of place and culture is
  following on the heels of globalization. This is
  being aided and abetted, it is said, by two
  phenomena the spread of multinational
  corporations and their products to all parts of
  the globe, and the availability of what were
  formerly culturally specific products in regions
  around the world (e.g. sushi, etc.).

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The Death of Place?

• This erosion of place, combined with the horrors
  associated with rabid nationalism/ ethnic
  cleansing (Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia) or anti-Western
  reaction against globalization (Afghanistan,
  Islamic fundamentalism) have led some to suggest
  that place identity and distinctiveness are
  either redundant or reactionary, including with
  the example of middle class people withdrawing
  into sanitized gated communities.
• Influential geographer David Harvey gave an
  important paper in 1990 that articulated this
  view.

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The Death of Place?

• He gives the example of how the media in
  Baltimore made hay out of a vicious double murder
  in Guilford, a white middle-class enclave in that
  city which is fighting for its life in the
  midst of a surrounding largely Black ghetto. The
  killing of an elderly couple was used to argue
  for more policing and protection to protect
  decent people from 'outsiders.' It later turned
  out that the murderer was the victims' grandson.
• I experienced something of this 'protectionist'
  mentality when I visited my parents outside of
  Detroit last year.

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The Death of Place?

• Being influenced by Marxism, Harvey sees place as
  being shaped by the needs of capitalism.
  Capitalism invests in places which take on a
  temporary 'permanence' only so long as that
  serves its purposes. Thus, the industrial
  heartland of North America of yesteryear is the
  rust belt of today, and many of those
  communities have yet to find a way to reinvent
  themselves.
• Moreover, when places are destroyed to make way
  for industry, a freeway, or even for new housing,
  this can and usually does result in a terrible
  sense of psychological loss.
• Moreover, because investment is so mobile,
  communities are always competing to attract
  attention as good places to live, work and
  invest. Thus, place has become both more and less
  important, as illustrated in the work of Richard
  Florida.

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The Death of Place?

• This 'marketing' of place can lead to the
  duplication of facilities, such as convention
  centres and shopping malls, but also to the
  Disneyfication of places in pursuit of tourist
  dollars or Olympic site designation. As Harvey
  says, Investment in consumption spectacles, the
  selling of images of places, competition over the
  definition of cultural and symbolic capital, the
  revival of vernacular traditions associated with
  places as a consumer attraction, all become
  conflated in inter-place competition.
• Can you think of examples?

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The Death of Place?

• Before moving off Harvey, we should note that he
  is the author of the idea of time-space
  compression, whereby the various parts of the
  world are growing closer together both in time
  and space, as a result of economic and
  technological changes, thus leading to the
  potential loss of distinctiveness that we talked
  about earlier.
• While Harvey notes that place has become the
  focus for much resistance to capitalism and
  globalization, as with bioregionalism, he
  ultimately sees such people as Don Quixotes,
  tilting lances at windmills, or worse.
• He also argues that there is no one, authentic
  definition or sense of a place because any given
  place is contested between different groups, for
  whom it has different meanings.