Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
concentration is a first process, followed by economic growth and then by social
and regional disparities over time.
In reality, the demographic transition may be posited as happening in radically
different ways in advanced and poor countries, starting early in the poor
countries because medical aid to death control arrived, from the exterior, before
the rest of development, but finishing late as people failed to adopt Western
cultural norms about family size. In the advanced countries, medical aid was
only one of a number of technological improvements which occurred alongside
one another, and this problem of separation did not occur.
On top of Alonso's bell shapes, there are the changing concerns of people
mentioned earlier, shifting from such survival elements as food and clothing, to
welfare and then to quality of life. Putting these into the frame, there is a broader
picture of change. In traditional societies, the population and economy are
dispersed, and dominant concerns are those of survival. In the next stage, of early
development, there is the process of concentration of economic activity and
population in towns and cities, accompanied by a shift to welfare concerns, since
the new urban society does not provide mutual communal care as it did when
people lived in small communities.
Awareness of social inequality and regional inequality grows over time as
people become more educated and have the chance to observe other groups and
other regions. Political parties, movements, and regionalisms or local
nationalisms, may grow out of these concerns in a third stage. This will often
provoke regional development policies as well as policies for the reduction of
poverty or of differences between social groups.
In a later stage, the concerns move on to quality of life, and these concerns
may be expressed in a reversal of the concentrations of industry and population,
as technology permits decentralization and the movement of people out to more
attractive rural surroundings. Counterurbanization, a move away from the big
cities in a demographic and economic activity sense, is a feature of most West
European countries, as it is of the USA. In some countries, such as the UK, this
stage may be reached when there are still major concerns over regional or
sectoral inequalities, so that the development drive exhibits a complex set of
different aims for different groups in society. Thus Scotland, for example, presents
strong local nationalism linked to cultural past as well as to the more recent
industrial past. At the same time it is the recipient of inmigrants from England
who are leaving the large cities and seeking better quality of life.
Space and time
Over the years, more sophistication has come to the understanding of the
temporal and spatial processes of development. Two points may be made here
which will be returned to again at various points in the discussion: development
occurs in a lumpy, irregular form, first in time, and secondly in space. On the time
dimension, W.W.Rostow (1960) set up a famous approximation to the
