As we noted in chapter 1, there are few truly comparative studies of Third World urban development and we regard this as an important feature of our work. However, as we quickly discovered, comparative analysis of several cities undertaken by a group of researchers is not easy, and generates a whole host of methodological problems that the lone researcher working in a single context does not have to face. Therefore, we feel justified in including here a detailed account of our methodology in the hope that the staff of future projects might learn from our experience and from our mistakes.

Levels of field-work analysis

The team was formed in April 1978 and worked together until September 1980, when funding of the project formally ended. The first four months were spent in London making revisions to our methodology, refining our research questions and propositions, and in agreeing an outline questionnaire. In August, Ward and Raymond went to Mexico City where they stayed for one year, while Gilbert and Murray left for Bogotá where they spent seven months before moving to Valencia for their final five months. Midway during the period of field work a two-week meeting was arranged in Mexico City to allow the teams to discuss progress and to make whatever revisions and adjustments were necessary and practical at that stage of the programme.

Insofar as any sensible distinction can be made between the various social science disciplines, ‘human geography’ has traditionally been distinguished by its concern with three relationships. First, there is the relationship between the social and the spatial: between society and social processes on the one hand and the fact and form of the spatial organization of both of those things on the other. Second, there is the relationship between the social and the natural, between society and ‘the environment’. Third, there is a concern, which geography shares in particular with history, with the relationship between different elements – economy, social structure, politics, and so forth. While the ‘substance’ disciplines of the social sciences (economics, sociology, politics) tend to focus on particular parts of society, however difficult these are to distinguish and define, human geography's concern with ‘place’, with why different localities come to be as they are, has often led it to the study of how those different elements come together in particular spaces to form the complex mosaic which is the geography of society.

The way in which each of these relationships has been conceptualized has varied widely, and often quite dramatically, even in the recent history of the discipline. All have had their extreme versions. The most absolute of environmental determinists saw human character and social organization as a fairly direct and unmediated product of the physical (natural) environment.

The centralized nation-state was the outcome of political evolution. Whatever the merits of the nation-state, it became apparent in the twentieth century that it did not prevent the mounting horrors of war, and that alone it could not ensure economic prosperity. As a result, efforts were made to develop new political devices. The preferred solution among those of liberal outlook was the ‘international institution’. The aftermath of the First World War saw an attempt at institutional order through the League of Nations; the close of the Second World War brought the United Nations and a range of other more specialized bodies, some almost worldwide, others of lesser scope.

In Europe, the cradle of the nation-state, the most advanced attempts to develop a new institutional order are to be found. The idea of the nation-state as an ultimate, compelling reality was brought into question in Western Europe by the Second World War more widely and profoundly than had been the case after the First World War. The governments that had fused extreme nationalism and dictatorship, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, were buried in the war of aggressive brutality they had unleashed. International relations were restructured by alignments of states dominated by the new military superpowers. The battered nations of Europe were corralled into one or other of the two great blocs as world politics became dominated by the Cold War.

The fact that ‘Geography matters’ has been an underlying argument of the whole of this book, but in each section we have treated it in a different way. In the first section we looked at the social significance of conceptualization and at its relationship to developments both within and between societies. In the second section we looked at the significance of ‘geography’ in the constitution and operation of a number of very different social processes. Our argument there, and throughout, has been not only that the geography of society is socially constructed and that, to understand it, that fact must be recognized, but also that social processes and phenomena are constituted geographically. The corollary, therefore, is that to understand them account must be taken of their geography. In that second section, we considered this proposition in relation to the organization of the city, the constitution and reproduction of cultural forms, and the operation of international law. In the third section we turned our attention to the central question of the construction of ‘place’ and of geographical variation within the wider system, whether that be international or national.

In this final section we tackle the question at the broadest level of all, the level which allows us to pull together all our arguments: why does geography, in the sense in which we have defined it, matter to the development of society as a whole? Let us take an example which builds upon the conclusions of the last section.

In the preceding section each of the three chapters focused upon the internal characteristics and relations of a particular aspect of society and drew out their geographical significance. It was apparent, however, that none of the three social aspects – cultural forms, urban economic activity, and the processes of international law – could be conceived in isolation from other aspects of society. Although a series of interrelationships was lightly sketched between cultural, political and economic processes in varying degrees in the analyses, the actual links and connections between the social processes that shape and structure the different aspects of the social world were not developed. This development involves a process of synthesis, a process that takes the results of analysis, the detailed studies of particular aspects of society, and draws out the web of relationships that integrates and binds them to the wider social sphere. Sketched in this manner, the task of synthesis is to construct a more complex geography of social relations from the different geographies of culture, housing, employment, law, and so forth.

By synthesis, however, we wish to convey something more than a simple integration of the various subdivisions of the subject matter of geography. The conception of synthesis we wish to employ is not one of an exhaustive quest for each and every social relationship down to the last detail that comprises the geography of an area.

‘Nature’ is a complicated word: it has different meanings and these meanings affect each other. To discover how nature has been represented in Western culture, it may help to distinguish three very basic meanings: (1) the essential quality or character of something (the corrosive nature of salt water); (2) the underlying force which directs the world (nature is taking her course); (3) the material world itself, often the world that is separate from people and human society (to re-discover the joys of nature at the weekend).

If nature is usually taken as referring to the world ‘out there’ – from the smallest grasshopper, through the Grand Canyon, to the most distant galaxy – it is also believed that there is a force at work, that nature is working according to certain principles and that if we study nature we can deduce a moral lesson.

And that is why nature has a history. Nature cannot simply be regarded as what is out there – a physical universe which preceded the world of human values, and which will presumably outlive the human race – because what is out there keeps changing its meaning. Every attempt at describing nature, every value attributed to Nature – harmonious, ruthless, purposeful, random – brings nature inside human society and its values.

This essay is about how views of nature have changed through the centuries, and what these changes tell us about human history.

The nineteenth century saw the expansion of capitalist relations of production in Britain. It was a geographically uneven and differentiated process, and the resulting economic differences between regions are well known: the rise of the coalfields, of the textile areas, the dramatic social and economic changes in the organization of agriculture, and so forth. Each was both a reflection of and a basis for the period of dominance which the UK economy enjoyed within the nineteenth-century international division of labour. In this wider spatial division of labour, in other words, different regions of Britain played different roles, and their economic and employment structures in consequence also developed along different paths.

But the spread of capitalist relations of production was also accompanied by other changes. In particular it disrupted the existing relations between women and men. The old patriarchal form of domestic production was torn apart, the established pattern of relations between the sexes was thrown into question. This, too, was a process which varied in its extent and in its nature between parts of the country, and one of the crucial influences on this variation was the nature of the emerging economic structures. In each of these different areas ‘capitalism’ and ‘patriarchy’ were articulated together, accommodated themselves to each other, in different ways.

It is this process that we wish to examine here. Schematically, what we are arguing is that the contrasting forms of economic development in different parts of the country presented distinct conditions for the maintenance of male dominance.

We have concentrated on the essential symbolic structures of modes of thought that are potentially a part of the intellectual capacities of individuals in all societies. These modes are social in the sense that individuals producing them are influenced by society and the organizations or communities to which they belong. These social conditions undoubtedly affect the contents of the modes and the degree to which they are separate and distinct. There are, however, realms of activities that are predominantly group, collective or social, and in which the individuals act in the name of the group. Nations, cities, armies, families and scientific, religious and artistic organisations are examples of collective or social relationships or facts. These facts are linked to space in two related ways. First, the social organisations and the individuals within them are ‘in’ space and their interactions have spatial manifestations. Thus we have families in cities, and cities in regions containing other cities, and so on. Analysing these relationships has been the traditional concern of social geography and has resulted in such theories as central place, land use, and the gravity and potential models.

Second, social organisations are often territorial, a fact largely overlooked by all but some political geographers. Territoriality here does not mean the location and extension in space of a social organisation or of its members. Rather it means the assertion by an organisation, or an individual in the name of the organisation, that an area of geographic space is under its influence or control.

Introduction

It is commonplace to anyone that has ever lived in or seen a large city that you have to travel to do almost anything. Going to work, to the shops, to the cinema, a restaurant, to the hospital, school, community centre – then back home – are just a few of the daily activities that involve some form of travel. The journeys themselves could be made in different ways: by walking, by cycle or car; or by some form of public transport, like the bus or train. And as you travel around a city, it is equally obvious that, to varying degrees, activities are functionally clustered. The city centre has offices and the principal shops; there are factory districts; warehousing centres; residential areas separated by social status and date of construction; an entertainments district; out-of-town megastores, and so on. Once you look in detail at these broad, functional spatial separations, even closer specialisations emerge. The City of London, for example, is often just regarded as the financial centre, but within it there is a myriad of specialist centres: legal, printing, jewellery, insurance, banking, stock dealing, shipping and commodities dealing. Once such spatial specializations emerge, they have a remarkable tendency to survive for a long time. Yet they are not immutable, as the waves of deindustrialization that have hit Britain have shown.

Introduction

In this chapter we will consider how one particular local economy within Britain has been reorganized over the past twenty or thirty years. We will suggest that this reorganization, reflected in the apparently simple changes in the relative size of manufacturing and service employment, is in fact the product of complex relationships between the underlying ‘restructuring’ of the various industrial sectors pertinent to the locality. Thus, industrial location and employment changes are not simply the consequence of certain general processes which are merely developed to a lesser or greater extent in any particular local economy. Any such economy must rather be seen as a specific conjuncture, in both time and space, of the particular forms of capitalist and state restructuring within manufacturing and service industries. As Massey argues,

There are three important implications of this ‘structural’ approach for the analysis of industrial location and employment change. First, the changing forms of the spatial division of labour, especially the shift away from a high degree of regional specialization, derive from new patterns of capital accumulation. In particular, they reflect the internationalization of capitalist accumulation and the development of ‘neo-Fordist’ methods by which the labour process is controlled.

An estimated 14–20 million persons are currently living and working in countries where they are neither citizens nor immigrants. Half of these nonimmigrant workers are legally admitted ‘guestworkers’; the rest are ‘illegal aliens’ or ‘undocumented workers.’ These migrant workers must be distinguished from two other transient groups: the 1 million permanent immigrants who begin anew in another country each year and the 13 million refugees living outside their country of citizenship and liable to prosecution if they return. The distinctions between the three groups are often blurred, as when migrant workers become immigrants.

The migration familiar to Americans moved transients and settlers from East to West. The migratory chain established in the nineteenth century recurs today – single males migrate first and later are joined by their dependents. Family reunification and formation establish a community in the receiving area to which later migrants come. Thus is forged the migratory chain which moves people between two areas. From 1800 to 1920, some 50 million Europeans arrived in the Americas. Early waves of immigrants intended (or were forced) to effect a relatively clean break with their homeland.

Migration streams mature over time. The second wave of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contained many ‘target earners’; young men who hoped to work hard, live frugally, save money, and return home to marry, buy a farm, build a house, or open a small store.

The question of whether or not there will be substantial physical and social limits to economic growth cannot be answered with any degree of certainty. While one can be certain that spring will follow winter, and autumn will follow summer, the same kind of certainty does not exist when forecasting the state of the environment in the future. The type of demands upon the environment will depend as today upon the form and extent of social activity. It is necessary to state the obvious, namely that different societies both today and in the past have made different demands and impacts upon the environment. If, for example, present-day energy consumption in different countries is compared, one tends to find that high levels of consumption occur in countries with high levels of economic activity. Nonetheless, there is a good deal of variation between countries with similar levels of economic activity. G. Foley comments:

Energy demands in the future will depend to a considerable extent upon the form of economic development. Using energy-accounting techniques, P. Chapman, G. Leach and others have demonstrated vast differences in energy consumption for different ways of producing similar objectives in transport, agriculture, heating houses, packaging of goods, etc.

The message of the introduction to this book was straightforward: geography matters to all of the disciplines in the social sciences. Social processes necessarily take place in geographical space and in some relation to nature, and this carries a series of implications for all explanations of social activity. Neither sociologists nor economists, it should be said, are opposed to the argument that space and nature have a part to play in social explanation; they are not unaware that social activity occurs in space or that nature impinges upon social action. It is not part of our argument that the social science disciplines today are simply blind to these features of the social world; rather, it is that they have failed to conceive the extent to which space and nature are integral to an understanding of social activity and social change.

Space is not simply a surface upon which changes, say, in the structure of the British economy are played out. Changes within the structure of economic production involve the geographical reorganisation of labour and capital; and, in turn, the changing geography of economic activity affects the shape and composition of the workforce and throws up new cultural patterns and political configurations. Changes in the technology of production are central to this process of geographical and social reorganization – changes which involve a rearrangement and control of natural forces to achieve profitable and competitive conditions of production.