Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
evident across the landscape of the country. His summary of the enormous
impacts of the shrinking world in the face of twentieth-century modernization
is earthy but apt: “It is as if a quiet game of croquet had been transformed
into a stirring contest of polo, with its mounted players covering a greatly
enlarged
field at high speed, while the game was yet in progress” (1941:119).
Within the discipline of geography, time-space compression was
fi
rst theor-
ized in terms of the friction of distance imposed by high transportation costs.
Closely associated with the friction of distance was its measurement in terms
of travel time and cost, which tend to be more useful in explaining travel
patterns than are absolute distances. Abler (1975:36), for example, notes that
“Time and cost are more powerful determinants of behavior than are abso-
lute distances.” Early transportation geographers occasionally o
fi
ered maps
of isochrones to reveal the relative accessibility of places to one another
(e.g., Kish 1958). Similarly, Taa
ff
ff
e's (1956, 1959) pioneering analysis of air
tra
c patterns pointed to aviation as a space-adjusting technology. Chapman
(1968), in a study of railroad travel times among European cities, examined
accessibility in terms of the
fluctuating hierarchy of cities.
In a seminal series of papers, Don Janelle (1968, 1969) introduced the
notion of time-space convergence, the rate at which places drew closer to one
another over time in relative space due to rising transport speeds even as the
absolute distance between them remained constant. One example concerned
the changing travel times between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan, which
took approximately 1,300 minutes by stagecoach in 1840. By the 1870s, with
the arrival of the steam locomotive, travel time had been reduced by more
than 85 percent, to 180 minutes; with the introduction of the automobile, the
journey was further reduced to only 80 minutes (Figure 2.1). Thus, while the
absolute distance between the cities remained the same, the relative distance
was reduced by 1,220 minutes over 120 years, or roughly ten minutes per year.
Similarly, between 1800 and 1965, travel times between Boston and New York
declined from 4,800 to 300 minutes, or 27 minutes per year (Janelle 1991).
Marchand (1973) extended this line of thought to assess the changing acces-
sibility of cities within road networks using travel times in Venezuela, while
Ward (1989) applied the same approach to an analysis of Paci
fl
c Islands
and the impacts of aviation on their relative accessibility (see also Forer
and Parrott 1991). Janelle (1973) also introduced the notion of time-space
divergence, such as when urban infrastructures become so overloaded with
tra
fi
cant delays occur due to congestion.
In the same vein, Abler (1975) emphasized space-adjusting technologies as
the primary cause of time-space compression. The logical end point of the
conquest of distance was the annihilation of geography, or “Complete time-
space convergence—a situation in which no di
c that signi
fi
erences in the time required to
reach near or distant points exist—shrinks areas to points” (Abler 1975: 40).
Abler claimed that complete time-space convergence had materialized in
North America, in which the entire continent was e
ff
ectively located “at the
same place,” a view that skips over the enormous social and spatial divides in
ff
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