Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
clustering and cumulative nature of development changes: in geographic space,
and in the abstract spaces of the financial and business worlds, allied to their
clustering in time. This was the central point made by the studies of François
Perroux, although his work was reinterpreted into a planning tool of dubious
value by later workers (Perroux 1988). Concentration is thus a feature which is
unavoidable, a point that needs to be borne in mind when we consider the
various efforts of policy-makers to redistribute wealth or production in regional
policies.
Another point which may be made about the spatial or regional effects of
economic change is that each region, being smaller than the nation it belongs to,
is liable to feel the effects of change more drastically, because in general it will
have a narrower economy, relying perhaps on one important product, which
itself comes from one or two major local resources. Each region has an
economy, in the modern world, which is more fragile than the nation, and
policies for helping development, if they are needed at all, are perhaps most
needed at the local or regional level.
Anti-development
As economic change under capitalism has gone on since at least the time of the
Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, there have been a series of
revolts against innovations. These varied from those attacking the introduction of
machinery or new products (like the Luddites, a group of English workers who
destroyed the textile machines that they rightly saw as destroying their own more
primitive livelihoods, in a movement which ran from 1811 to 1814), to Utopians
like Robert Owen, who sought the alleviation of poverty in the early nineteenth
century through the creation of new communities on the frontier where they
could reform society; and forward to the modern movements against standard
development practice, such as the advocates of Development from Below, or the
new environmental movements which ally protest against capitalism with
concern for the environment.
At their most pessimistic, the protesters claim that modern changes, such as
the liberalization of the economy being undertaken in Africa, bring negative
development and impoverishment to large sectors of society, and particularly to
the rural peasant groups. While these protest movements are well founded in
reality for rural localities, they often bypass the main changes taking place in the
economy to which they refer. Rural regression in Africa (Taylor & Mackenzie
1992) does not preclude urban advance in the same continent, and the advance
of the urban may be the salvation of the rural. In cities, social customs change
with rapidity, such as norms regarding the size of the family. Thus for
demographic change, to limit the tide of population growth that threatens to
overwhelm countries such as China and India, migration to the cities, rather than
a rearrangement of rural life itself, may be the main part of the solution. It is thus
necessary to take as wide a view as possible of the economy and society to which
