Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
class to consume products, or in the lingo of Keynesian economics, it enhanced
aggregate demand. Credit systems essentially “colonize” future time as a
stream of obligations (Giddens 1984), thus acting to conjoin present and
future.
Additionally, cities both expressed and contributed to late modern time-
space compression by playing host to critical international festivals and con-
ferences. World's fairs had long played a central role in the demonstration of
technological and cultural superiority, including the 1851 Great Exhibition
of the Works of Industry of All Nations held at the Crystal Palace in London,
the 1867 Paris Exposition, that in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), which
unveiled the telephone, and Chicago in 1893, which opened with the
rst
telephone link between that city and New York. Similarly, the revival of the
Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896, drew attention to cooperation and
competition as motifs found throughout the planet. The vitality of cities,
therefore, their continued ability to generate innovations, inspire and enter-
tain, and to attract creative people, has long been a consistent theme in the
literature on urbanization (e.g., Jacobs 1961; Florida 2002).
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Modern science and the explosion of time-space
Much as the Copernican revolution fueled a theological crisis in the sixteenth
century, so too did the Darwinian revolution transform the Western sense of
geological and scienti
c time in the nineteenth. The Church had, of course,
long grappled with the challenge posed by secular time, and responded with
a
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fl
flurry of attempts to date Creation: Eusebius
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figured it to be 5198
bc
;
Bede estimated it to be 3952
; and by the sixteenth century, no less than
50 dates competed for the honor. James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh,
famously calculated that it began precisely on Sunday, October 26, 4004
bc
bc
at 9:00 a.m. In the nineteenth-century battle to secularize time, it was geol-
ogy and biology rather than astronomy that played the key roles (Rudwick
2005). Escaping the conservative straitjacket of religious dogma was no
easy task: one set of time-space understandings does not replace another
unproblematically. The upshot in many ways expanded intellectual notions
of time and space even as they were being compacted economically and
socially. As Dodgshon (1998:117) notes, “Modernization may have produced
a time-space compression in terms of the movement of people, goods and
ideas, but it has also produced an equally signi
cant time-space expansion in
that, culturally, we are now more aware of time and space, as dimensions that
have extension.” Modernity greatly expanded the understanding of the his-
tory of the planet, a process that repositions the here and now as only one
moment in a long series of moments and places within a much broader
universe.
Geology emerged as the site of an intense confrontation in the nineteenth-
century culture wars. Steadily the
fi
field's appreciation of the depth of geologic
time lengthened: in the 1770s, the Comte de Bu
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ff
on determined the earth was
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