Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
described by Soja (2000), in which cities became centers of auto-catalytic
processes of innovation.
Urbanization was also central to the discursive transformations of this
period: Renaissance cities, for example, were remade under the totalizing dis-
courses of modernity. Renaissance politicians and scholars held the classical
era in high esteem: the very word Renaissance, derived from Vasari's term
Rinascita , heralded the rebirth of something old rather than the creation of
something new; echoes of the older cyclical view of time thus reverberated. In
this context, the Renaissance city was often envisioned as the reconstituted
Greek polis . Nutti (1999:98) holds that “Fascinated by suggestions from
Greek geographical culture available from a rediscovered Ptolemy,
fifteenth-
century Italy initiated a search for an all-embracing view, from an elevated
vantage point at a distance” in order to assess the nature of urban space.
Renaissance portraits of towns, therefore, strove to overcome the limited view
of the solitary observer in order to represent space from the disembodied
perspective of a Cartesian cogito suspended above the world. Urban space,
then, did not simply re
fi
ect early modern time-space compression, it actively
contributed to its making. Nonetheless, capitalism's relentless search for new
markets initiated a wide-ranging scalar transformation that decisively shifted
the locus of power from the city to a broader sociospatial con
fl
guration.
The shift in scale from the city-state to the “power-container” of the nation-
state—the prime manifestation of late modern time-space compression—
re
fi
cation
of land and labor; the centralization of law enforcement, particularly regard-
ing property rights; printing and explicit codes of law; the di
fl
ected a large variety of factors, including: the intensi
fi
ed commodi
fi
usion of paper
money as a medium of national and international exchange; apparatuses of
taxation, surveillance, and documentation such as the census; the expansion
of public services, such as the postal service, but also coercive ones such as the
judiciary and penal system and public education; and gradual improvements
in transportation. National governments increasingly standardized measures
of distance and weight: Elizabeth I, for example, decreed the Roman mile
of 5,200 feet was henceforth 5,280 feet, or eight furlongs (“furrow-longs”)
(Boorstin 1983). Credit systems,
ff
finance, and banking were also central to the
national organization of space and time, including uniform national curren-
cies. England did not possess a uniform coinage until 1160, and France not
until 1262 (Mann 1986).
Within nation-states, banking systems created homogeneous
fi
financial
spaces in which the cost of capital was almost totally invariant. “Deferred
payment, particularly in the shape of credit, is one of the prime forms of
time-space distanciation facilitated by the emergence of a money economy”
(Giddens 1987:156). Financial markets spiraled outward from individual
states to become transnational at a remarkably early date: European
fi
fi
financial
systems had become su
ciently integrated by the fourteenth century that
when Edward III defaulted in 1339, the Italian markets were deeply shaken.
The emergence of regularized banking networks in the eighteenth century was
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