Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Field Note
“ 'You cannot come to southern Brazil without see-
ing our biggest city,' said the vintner who was showing
me around the Cooperativa Aurora, the huge winery
in Bento Gonçalves, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul.
'Besides, it's January, so they'll be having the big marches,
it's almost like carnival time in Rio!'
So I headed for Porto Alegre, only to fi nd that a
hotel room was not to be had. Tens of thousands of dem-
onstrators had converged on the State's capital, largest
port, and leading industrial city—and what united them
was opposition to globaliz a tion.
It was not quite a carnival, but the banners held
aloft by the noisy, sometimes singing and dancing dem-
onstrators left no doubt as to their common goals.
The World Social Forum has become an annual
event held in cities around the world, with ever-larger
marches and meetings to protest the actions of the
world's dominant states, especially the United States. The World Social Forum is a network of antiglobalizationists—people
who seek an alternative economic reality for the globe, one not centered on accumulation of capital. Socialist economic views,
leftist political leanings, and support for minority causes combine each year at the World Social Forum in a show of strength.”
Figure 14.5
Porto Alegre, Brazil.
© Lima Agliberto/Gamma-Presse/Zuma Press.
have signifi cant negative local consequences. According
to Maskus, the rules negotiated for the World Trade
Organization “inevitably r
networks that knit together the contemporary world, and
these affect the character of different places and the inter-
actions among them.
While networks have always existed, Castells says
that they have fundamentally changed since 1995 as a
result of the diffusion of information technology that
links places in a global, yet uneven, way. Through infor-
mation technology networks, Castells argues that global-
ization has proceeded by “linking up all that, according to
dominant interests, has value anywhere in the planet, and
discarding anything (people, fi rms, territories, resources)
which has no value or becomes devalued.” Information
technology networks link some places more than others,
helping to create the spatial unevenness of globalization
as well as the uneven outcomes of globalization.
efl ect the economic interest of
powerful lobbyists” in places such as the United States
and the European Union, and have heightened wealth dif-
ferences between more and less prosperous regions, and
strengthened an inherently unequal global system.
However one views these arguments, the globalizing
trends of the last few decades mean that we are, in many
respects, living on an unprecedented scale. In Andrew
Kirby's words, we are living “not so much in a world without
boundaries, or in a world without geography—
but more lit-
erally in a world
, as opposed to a neighborhood or a region”
(emphasis added).
Networks
Manuel Castells defi nes
networks
as “a set of intercon-
nected nodes” without a center. A nonhierarchical net-
work is horizontally structured, with power shared among
all participants and ideas fl owing in all directions. The
multitude of networks that exist in the world—fi nancial,
transportation, communication, kinship, corporate, non-
governmental, trade, government, media, education,
social and dozens of others—enable globalization to occur
and create a higher degree of interaction and interde-
pendence among people than ever before in human his-
tory. But there are deeply entrenched hierarchies in the
Time-Space Compression
Access (or lack of access) to information technology net-
works creates time-space compression (chapters 1 and 4).
Time-space compression means that certain places, such
as global cities (especially in the core), are more intercon-
nected than ever through communication and transpor-
tation networks, even as other places, such as those in the
periphery, are farther removed than ever. According to
Castells, the age of information technology networks has
been more revolutionary than the advent of the printing
press or the Industrial Revolution. He claims that we are
