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

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.

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.).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.