Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cult to generalize. We would fi nd some trends, such as
how women in poverty who have children cope differently
than single men or how illegal immigrants cope differ-
ently from legal immigrants, but no two individual cases
are the same.
Because the level of detail and the patterns observed
change as the scale changes, geographers must be sensitive
to their scale of analysis and also be wary of researchers who
make generalizations about a people or a place at a particu-
lar scale without considering other scales of analysis.
Geographers' concern with scale goes beyond an
interest in the scale of individual phenomena to a concern
with how processes operating at different scales infl uence
one another. If you want to understand the confl ict
between the Tutsi and the Hutu people in Rwanda, for
example, you cannot look solely at this African country.
The Rwandan confl ict was infl uenced by developments at
a variety of different scales, including patterns of migration
and interaction in Central Africa, the economic and polit-
ical relations between Rwanda and parts of Europe, and
the variable impacts of globalization-economic, political,
and cultural.
Geographers are also interested in how people use
scale politically. Locally based political movements, such as
the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, have learned to
rescale
their actions-to involve players at other scales and create a
global outcry of support for their position. By taking their
political campaign from the local scale to the national scale
through, for example, protests against the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and then effectively
using the Internet to wage a global campaign, the Zapatistas
gained attention from the world media, a feat relatively few
local political movements achieve.
Geographer Victoria Lawson uses the term
jumping
scale
to describe such rescaling activities. She compares
the ways in which Western countries, multinational cor-
porations, and the World Trade Organization take prod-
ucts and ideas created in Western places and by Western
corporations and globalize all rights to profi ts from them
through intellectual property law. Efforts to push
European and American views of intellectual property
on the globe negate other local and regional views of
products and ideas. To the West, rice is a product that
can be owned, privatized, and bought and sold. To East
Asians, rice is integral to culture, and new rice strains
and new ideas about growing rice can help build com-
munity, not just profi t. Lawson explains that taking a
single regional view and jumping scale to globalize it can
serve to legitimate that view and negates other regional
and local views.
WHY ARE GEOGRAPHERS CONCERNED
WITH SCALE AND CONNECTEDNESS?
Geographers study places and patterns at a variety of
scales, including local, regional, national, and global.
Scale has two meanings in geography: the fi rst is the dis-
tance on a map compared to the distance on the Earth,
and the second is the spatial extent of something.
Throughout the topic, when we refer to scale we are using
the second of these defi nitions. Geographers' interest in
this type of scale derives from the fact that phenomena
found at one scale are usually infl uenced by what is hap-
pening at other scales; to explain a geographic pattern or
process, then, requires looking across scales. Moreover,
the scale of our research or analysis matters because we
can make different observations at different scales. We
can study a single phenomenon across different scales in
order to see how what is happening at the global scale
affects localities and how what is happening at a local scale
affects the globe. Or we can study a phenomenon at a par-
ticular scale and then ask how processes at other scales
affect what we are studying.
The scale at which we study a geographic phenom-
enon tells us what level of detail we can expect to see.
We also see different patterns at different scales. For
example, when we study the distribution of material
wealth at the scale of the globe (see Fig. 1.3), we see that
the countries in western Europe, Canada, the United
States, Japan, and Australia are the wealthiest, and the
countries of Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia are
the poorest. Does that mean everyone in the United
States is wealthy and everyone in Indonesia is poor?
Certainly not, but on a global-scale map of states, that is
how the data appear.
When you shift scales to North America and
examine the data for States of the United States and the
provinces of Canada (Fig. 1.16), you see that the
wealthiest areas are on the coasts and the poorest are in
the interior and in the extreme northeast and south.
The State of Alaska and the province of the Northwest
Territories have high gross per capita incomes that
stem largely from oil revenues that are shared among
the residents.
By shifting scales again to just one city, for example,
metropolitan Washington, D.C. (Fig. 1.17), you observe
that suburbs west, northwest, and southwest of the city are
the wealthiest and that suburbs to the east and southeast
have lower income levels. In the city itself, a clear dichot-
omy of wealth divides the northwest neighborhoods from
the rest of the city. Shifting scales again to the individual,
if we conducted fi eldwork in Washington, D.C., and
interviewed people who live below the poverty line, we
would quickly fi nd that each person's experience of pov-
erty and reasons for being in poverty vary-making it diffi -
Regions
Geographers often divide the world into regions for
analysis. Many colleges offer a course in world regional
