# data[].attributes.body
i rest my case

# data[].attributes.body
this one was a little dark. Sue me

# data[].attributes.body
In urban populations there are situations in which people of other races or class face discrimination, such as, redlining and blockbusting and they have trouble buying a house.

# data[].attributes.body
The picture at the top the people are content because the environment is thriving and growing. The picture at the bottom the people are angry because the environment has been affected by these agricultural practices.

# data[].attributes.body
When the European empires were dividing Africa between each other they used superimposed boundaries. Superimposed boundaries are boundaries that impose on an area with complete disregard for the cultural divisions.

# data[].attributes.body
Religion is a cultural pattern that is both a centrifugal force and centripetal force.

# data[].attributes.body
The way SpongeBob is getting stronger after each picture represents the Demographic Transition Model and how a country advances or becomes stronger through each stage it goes through.

# data[].attributes.body
The giant man and tiny man represent the difference in size between these two scales of analysis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Education for sustainable development (ESD) is UNESCO's education sector response to the urgent and dramatic challenges the planet faces. The collective activities of human beings have altered the earth's ecosystems so that our very survival seems in danger because of changes more difficult to reverse every day.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 8:48•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fordism, Outsourcing, and other changes as a Result of the World Economy! AP Human Geography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Neoliberal policies, including free trade agreements, have created new organizations, spatial connections, and trade relationships, such as the EU, World Trade Organization (WTO), Mercosur, and OPEC, that foster greater globalization. These are in Unit 4 in more detail as supranational organizations.

Comparative advantage means that a country can produce a product at less cost and with more efficiency than other countries. Complementary advantage means that the two countries have opposing comparative advantages and engage in trade with each other.

The US, Mexico, and Canada used to be in a free-trade relationship called NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) that had a full removal of all tariffs (taxes on goods that cross international borders). These tariffs created more trade (free trade for that matter) between these 3 countries especially in booming border towns along the borders of each country. Free Trade also allowed for maquiladoras to be built in Mexico that sadly exploited poor Mexican migrant workers. These maquiladoras did, on the other hand, allow for cheaper and quicker manufacturing of products to be sold in the NAFTA zone.

The economies of the EU have been interdependent (reliant on each other to succeed) because they are all members of the Eurozone and use the same currency. The countries go through prosperity together when their economies flourish and when they have trade surpluses. They also go through rough times together like in Greece where the country's economy has started to fail and default on all of their foreign investment.

Since Greece is struggling and they are an EU member country, the other EU member countries like France and Germany must support them. Since Greece was struggling and the UK was in a flourishing economy, the British wanted to "Brexit" or leave the EU since they were only losing money supporting Greece.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trade and the World Economy | 2022 AP Hug Unit 7 Study Guide | Fiveable

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Neoliberal policies, including free trade agreements, have created new organizations, spatial connections, and trade relationships, such as the EU, World Trade Organization (WTO), Mercosur, and OPEC, that foster greater globalization. These are in Unit 4 in more detail as supranational organizations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Why are humans the way they are? Why is it that the abilities of children seem so different than those of adults? What can one do to help children become fully developed adults? These are the kinds of questions that theorists of human development try to answer.

As it is easy to imagine from questions that are so broad, the answers theorists offer are equally broad, typically telling more about people in general than about what any one person is likely to do on a particular day. Furthermore, given such questions, the answers theorists arrive at are not always the same. In some cases this is because different theorists study different aspects of human development; in other cases it is because different theorists do their work using different sets of assumptions.

These differing assumptions reflect theoretical debates about four things. First, they reflect a debate about what in fact one should look at in order to measure the course of human development-should it be someone's actual behavior or the presumed internal psychological processes that might be reflected in behavior? Second, theorists debate how best to portray humans-are humans autonomous, self-directed individuals or ones acting largely in response to external events? Third, theorists differ as to the generalizability of their findings-is there one theory that explains the development of all people in all places at all times or are there many theories, each specific to a historical time and place? Finally, theorists differ as to the actual methods that should be used to divine the answers to all of these questions.

One useful way to understand these different approaches to the study of human development is to think of them as reflecting relatively distinct world-views. A worldview is not a theory but something larger. It represents a set of assumptions that a theory may draw upon to serve as the foundation of that theory's investigations. Three worldviews are evident in the work of developmental theorists. They are referred to as the Mechanistic Worldview, the Organismic Worldview, and the Contextualist Worldview. Theories that share the same worldview, even if they are not studying the exact same thing, are nevertheless said to belong to the same family of theories.

The Mechanistic Worldview

Theories built on a Mechanistic Worldview reflect a belief that behavior and behavior change are predictable, lawful phenomena that can, theoretically at least, be fully understood through the use of systematic, objective empirical research methods (empirical meaning that the methods rely on observation or experimentation). Secondly, mechanists believe that behavior is caused by either factors external to the individual (efficient causes) or those defining the individual's biological makeup (material causes). Efficient causes include such things as parenting style, educational opportunities, and peer group composition. Material causes include inherited genetic characteristics and more general biological qualities such as temperament or information processing capability.

Two prominent examples of work within a Mechanistic Worldview are the operant conditioning model, most closely associated with B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), and the behavior genetic model, associated with the work of Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr, among others. These two models are very contradictory. Skinner's work reflects the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate, while Plomin and Scarr's work reflects the nature side of the debate.

Operant Conditioning Model

Skinner's operant conditioning model examines the relationship between a behavior and its consequence. As a model of human development, the operant model is seen as a means of understanding how life experiences influence an individual's actions. It demonstrates how changes in the consequences of one's behavior can in turn modify that behavior. In essence, responses are more likely to increase if followed by a positive (i.e., desirable) consequence and less likely if followed by a negative (i.e., undesirable) consequence. Skinner also found that the timing or schedule of the contingent reinforcement is an equally significant variable. Continuous reinforcement is generally seen as more effective in establishing a response; variable or intermittent reinforcement is seen as more effective at maintaining a response at a high level once it has been established.

Skinner restricted his actual work to laboratory animals-pigeons and mice in particular-but he made it clear in his writings that he saw these general principles as governing the behavior of all species, human or otherwise. Further, others working in this tradition have demonstrated that these principles of operant conditioning are very useful in helping to un-tangle complicated family dynamics as well as the more subtle forms of observational learning.

Behavior Genetic Model

Behavior genetic models offer a different approach to answering the perennial nature-nurture debate. Through elaborate statistical procedures, behavior geneticists attempt to determine how much of the difference in a group of individuals can be said to be due to genetic factors and how much to environmental factors. Behavior genetic research with humans cannot, of course, involve selective breeding (the preferred technique when working with animals), so behavior genetic researchers look for situations that they believe allow for "experiments in nature." The two most common research designs for humans involve comparing individuals of different degrees of genetic relatedness and comparing adopted children to both their biological and adopted parents. Behavior genetic researchers report that both types of studies show a significant genetic contribution to many human characteristics, including intelligence and personality. That is, identical twins appear more similar than fraternal twins or siblings, who are in turn more similar than cousins, who are in turn more similar than unrelated individuals. Further, adopted children share many characteristics with their biological parents, even if they are adopted at birth.

The Organismic Worldview

Those favoring an Organismic Worldview recognize both efficient and material causes as important but place even more emphasis on what they see as formal and final causes. Formal causes reflect the organizational quality of all living systems, while final causes reflect organicists' belief that human development is a directional process. To use an analogy, when hydrogen and oxygen are combined to form water, a substance is created with properties radically different than either of its two constituents. At room temperature, hydrogen and oxygen each exists as a gas but water exists asa liquid. Water is very good for putting out fires, while oxygen and hydrogen actually have the opposite effect. As such, the emerging properties of water are radically different from the properties of the individual elements of which it is comprised. In the same way, organicists argue that humans are each more than the sum of their parts and that humans are actively involved in their own construction.

Two of the major theoretical traditions within the Organismic Worldview are the psychoanalytic models associated with the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Erik Erikson (1902-1994), and the cognitive developmental model associated with the work of Jean Piaget (1896-1980).

Freud's Psychoanalytic Model

Freud's work, although highly controversial both then and now, is important because it helps highlight the importance of the early bonds between a parent and a child and helps show how experiences early in life may influence subsequent life experiences.

It is ironic that Freud's theory, one of the most controversial theories of child development, is based not on a careful examination of children but rather on clinical interviews he conducted with adult patients in the course of his psychiatric practice in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. Freud, the clinician, believed that his adult patients' problems stemmed from their early childhood experiences, and as a result his approach to therapy was to help them regress to those early experiences so that the traumatic nature of the experiences could be uncovered and therefore resolved.

Freud saw activity during the first year of life, what he called the oral stage, centered on the mouth and the process of learning to take in, both in the biological and psychological sense, those things that initially are external to the infant. Because this taking in or incorporating is pleasurable to the child, Freud saw those associated with the process, most notable the mother and the father, as also acquiring positive value in the eyes of the infant. To Freud, a psychic force, the id, regulated these early efforts on the part of the infant. The id exists in the infant's subconscious and has the sole purpose of reducing tension and increasing gratification.

By age two or three, during the anal stage, the focus of activity shifts from the oral region to the anal region, with issues of retention and elimination, again, at both the biological and psychological levels, becoming paramount. Because the child is now being asked to learn to balance power and control, a second psychic force, the ego, emerges as a regulatory mechanism. Unlike the id, the ego resides partly in consciousness and partly in unconsciousness and as such serves to help the child become socialized; that is, it helps the child recognize that she must respond to considerations other than her own immediate gratification.

The preschool years witness the phallic stage and a further shift in focus to the genitalia and issues of sex role identification. Freud sees this process as one of conflict for the child because the child initially sees the same-sex parent as a competitor for the affections of the opposite-sex parent rather than as a mentor and role model. Successful resolution of the conflict comes about through the emergence of a third psychic force, the superego. The superego resides entirely in the child's consciousness and is, in essence, the child's conscience. It is the superego that helps the child recognize the legitimacy of society's social expectations for the child.

Middle childhood brings a respite to the child, a time Freud called the latency stage. According to Freud, from age five to thirteen children's efforts are directed at establishing same-sex friendships, strengthening ties with parents, and meeting the social and intellectual demands imposed by school and society.

The adolescent years witness the emergence of the genital stage. Again the focus is on the genitalia but it has shifted from parent-child issues to issues of establishing intimacy with a same-age peer. How successful the adolescent and young adult is in establishing adult sexual relationships is, to Freud, largely a function of how successfully earlier stages were resolved.

Erikson's Psychoanalytic Model

Erikson's revision of Freud's theory reflected his belief in the interpersonal nature of human development. Erikson offered a sequence of eight developmental stages-or as he called them, psychosocial tasks-that must be successfully accomplished for a person to become fully developed. Erikson's first psychosocial task involves developing a basic sense of trust and is seen as the major developmental milestone for the infant. Developing a basic sense of trust comes about through the interactions with the infant's primary caregivers. The more predictable and appropriate the interactions, the more easily a sense of trust is established.

Erikson's remaining seven psychosocial tasks then follow in sequence, each associated with a particular period of the lifespan. Toddlers are expected to use their sense of trust to venture forth and establish a basic sense of autonomy. The preschooler, in turn is asked to develop a sense of initiative. By middle childhood, this sense of initiative is now expected to more fully develop into a sense of industry. One characteristic of Erikson's work that is well illustrated in these first four stages is their nested nature. For successful completion, each requires resolution at all previous levels. No resolution halts development; partial resolution restricts further development.

By adolescence, individuals are asked to form a sense of identity, which is seen as forming the foundation for the establishment of a sense of intimacy, the defining event of the early years of adulthood. Intimacy typically leads to some form of permanent bond, which in turn often leads to parenthood and the opportunity to develop a sense of generativity, or concern for the next generation. Finally, toward the end of life, one is asked to form a sense of ego integrity, to accept the life you have led as the life you have led.

Piaget's Cognitive Development Model

Unlike Erikson who focused on interpersonal relationships, Piaget focused on children's cognitive development, in particular on the cognitive structures or mechanisms that are available to individuals of different ages to help them make meaning out of their everyday experiences. Piaget saw this effort to make meaning as reflecting a desire to maintain an equilibrium or balance between the individual and his context. New experiences create a degree of disequilibrium, which the individual tries to adapt to either by drawing on previous experiences to make sense of the new one (a process Piaget referred to as assimilation) or by making the necessary cognitive changes to adapt to the new situation (a process of accommodation). This continual process of assimilation and accommodation leads to the changes in the individual's cognitive organization that were of interest to Piaget.

Piaget saw this developmental process as occurring in a sequence of four periods or stages. The first, the sensory-motor period, typically occurs during the first two years or so of life. It is marked by Piaget's observation that infants are initially unable to act or behave on the basis of their mental representations (literally, re-presentations) of their experiences but rather act on the basis of their sensory and motor impressions of these experiences. To Piaget's infant, what something means is based on whatever sensory or motor interactions the infant is able to have with the object, person, or experience.

Gradually over the second and third years of life, young children begin to acquire the ability to act, in a very elementary fashion, on their mental representations of objects, people, and events. This preoperational period, which typically lasts until ages five to seven, is characterized by the child's growing use of language, the increasing ability to engage in pretend play and imitation, and a growing ability to understand simple functional relationships. These young children, however, still have difficulty in appreciating the fact that others do not see things from the same perspective as they do (what Piaget referred to as egocentric thought), and they are still relatively easily fooled by how things appear to be rather than how they must be.

As children enter middle childhood around age five to age seven, they move into the period of concrete operational thought. They are now no longer easily fooled by their perceptions because they have the cognitive skills necessary to have their logic "correct" their perception. Concrete operational children demonstrate the cognitive skills necessary to arrange, organize, and classify information; use the types of logical operations necessary for the understanding of mathematical and scientific operations; and modify their comments to reflect the perspective of the listener.

Beginning in adolescence and continuing throughout the adult years, formal operational adults are potentially able to apply logic to all situations- hypothetical or real. Piaget saw this ability to have "thought take flight" as a partial explanation for the expansiveness of adolescent behavior and even for the difficulty adolescents and young adults have in initially settling into productive adults lives.

The Contextualist Worldview

Although there are many differences between a mechanistic and an organismic worldview, they nevertheless share one important characteristic-they each view the process of development as universal. This emphasis on universality is one of the ways in which these two worldviews can be contrasted to the third, Contextualism. Contextualists do not believe that there are universal laws of development; rather, they argue that the forces that contribute to development are specific to historical time and social place.

Contextualists make their nonuniversal argument for two reasons: one empirical and one conceptual. From an empirical perspective, they argue that there is more than enough variability in the data comparing individuals and groups from different settings to raise serious questions about the assumption that human development reflects the same universal set of variables. From a conceptual perspective, contextualists argue that since it is impossible to ever have an objective (i.e., context-free) perspective on human development, then it is impossible to make judgments that are not culturally based.

Lev Vygotsky's (1896-1934) cultural-historical theory of human development is a good example of a theory rooted in a Contextualist Worldview since it places great emphasis on the role of culture in both defining and then transmitting the sign and symbol systems used in that culture. Sign and symbol systems are the ways cultures note and code information. They are reflected in the nature of the language, in ways for quantifying information, in the expression of the arts, and more generally in the ways people establish, maintain, and transmit social institutions and relationships across generations.

Vygotsky saw language as the defining characteristic of humans as a species, the one element that distinguishes humans from other species. Language allows for a shared communication, which in turn allows for collective effort or labor. This effort, in turn, sets the foundation for the progressive evolution of culture across generations. To Vygotsky, culture is a uniquely human phenomenon, allowing history to replace biology as the defining element in the lives of humans.

Of the various elements of Vygotsky's theory, the one that continues to receive the most attention, is his concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Vygotsky saw the ZPD as the mechanism through which a culture's sign and symbol systems were passed from generation to generation; not surprisingly, many educators see it as the key element in the educational process of children. The ZPD represents an interval between what a child (or adult) is able to do alone and what that person can do with the support of a more skilled person. For activity in the ZPD to be educationally meaningful, the teacher must have a clear sense of both what the child should learn and the child's current interests and abilities. In essence, intersubjectivity needs to be established between teacher and child so that the learner understands the goals of the teacher, and the teacher understands the child's present level. A failure to establish intersubjectivity indicates that the teacher will be ineffective in helping the child acquire new information because the strategies the teacher uses to help support the child's learning will be ineffective or inappropriate.

In addition to highlighting the educational process, the ZPD also highlights another important element of Vygotsky's theory, namely, the notion that the intermental always precedes the intramental. By this Vygotsky meant that all knowledge is first acquired as social knowledge and only later is it internalized and comprehended by the child. It is because all knowledge is first transmitted as social knowledge that the cultural-historical context of a particular culture is so important in understanding and defining an individual's development.

People sometimes tend to think of theories as abstract and not useful, as something only academics argue or care about. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. Theory is the foundation upon which all everyday ideas about human behavior and development are based. In the words of psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), "there is nothing so useful as a good theory."

See also: DEVELOPMENTAL NORMS; ERIKSON, ERIK; FREUD, SIGMUND; MILESTONES OF DEVELOPMENT; PIAGET, JEAN; SKINNER, B. F.; VYGOTSKY, LEV

Bibliography

Bandura, Albert. "Human Agency in Social Cognitive Theory." American Psychologist 44 (1989):1175-1184.

Bandura, Albert, and S. A. Ross. "Transmission of Aggression through Imitation of Aggressive Models." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63 (1961):575-582.

Burman, Erica. Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. London:Routledge, 1994.

Burman, Erica. "Continuities and Discontinuities in Interpretive and Textual Approaches in Developmental Psychology." Human Development 39 (1996):330-345.

Chandler, Michael. "Stumping for Progress in a Post-Modern World." In E. Amsel and K. A. Renninger eds., Change and Development: Issues of Method, Theory, and Application. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997.

Cole, Michael. "Cross-Cultural Research in the Sociohistorical Tradition." Human Development 31 (1988):137-157.

Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society. New York: Norton, 1950.

Erikson, Erik. Identity: Youth and Crisis. London: Faber, 1968.

Erikson, Erik. Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: Norton, 1980.

Erikson, Erik. The Life Cycle Completed. New York: Norton, 1997.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Modern Library, 1900.

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.

Gergen, Kenneth. "Stability, Change, and Chance in Understanding Human Development." In N. Datan and H. W. Reese eds., Life-Span Development Psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1977.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Goldhaber, Dale. Theories of Human Development: An Integrative Approach. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 2000.

Overton, Willis. "The Structure of Developmental Theory." In H.W. Reese ed., Advances in Child Development and Behavior. San Diego: Academic Press, 1991.

Patterson, Gerald. "Maternal Rejection: Determinant or Product for Deviant Child Behavior?" In W. W. Hartup and Z. Rubin eds., Relationships and Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986.

Pepper, Stephen. World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961.

Plomin, Robert. Development, Genetics and Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ:Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986.

Plomin, Robert. Genetics and Experience: The Interplay between Nature and Nurture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.

Reese, Hayne, and W. F. Overton. "Models of Development and Theories of Development." In L. R. Goulet and P. B. Baltes eds., Life-Span Developmental Psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1970.

Rogoff, Barbara. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Scarr, Sandra, and K. McCartney. "How People Make Their Own Environments: A Theory of Genotype-Environment Effects." Child Development 54 (1983):424-435.

Scarr, Sandra, and A. Ricciuti. "What Effects Do Parents Have onTheir Children?" In L. Okagaki and R. J. Sternberg eds., Directors of Development: Influences on the Development of Children's Thinking. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

Skinner, Burris F. The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938.

Skinner, Burris F. Walden Two. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Skinner, Burris F. Science and Human Behavior. New York: Free Press, 1953.

Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962.

Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
theories of developmentwhy are humans the way they are? why is it that the abilities of children seem so different than those of adults? what can one do to help children become fully developed adults? these are the kinds of questions that theorists of human development try to answer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENTWhy are humans the way they are? Why is it that the abilities of children seem so different than those of adults? What can one do to help children become fully developed adults? These are the kinds of questions that theorists of human development try to answer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Women In The Informal Economy & Microloans [AP Human Geography Unit 7 Topic 4] (7.4)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You may know that countries are sometimes classified as developed, developing, or emerging. But what does this classification mean? How is a country's development measured? This explanation will cover economic development and how economists measure it.

What is economic development?

As an economics student, you are must be definitely familiar with economic growth. But what is economic development? Is it the same as economic growth?

No, they don't mean the same thing.

Therefore, economic development goes beyond increasing the income and output associated with economic growth and also takes into account poverty reduction and income redistribution.

indicators are used to measure the well-being of people by considering factors that influence the standard of living in an economy.

There are a few main indicators that measure economic development. They are:

1. HDI - Human Development Index.

2. HPI - Human Poverty Index.

3. Multidimensional Poverty Index.

4. GPI - Genuine Progress Indicator.

The Human Development Index (HDI) as a measure of development

This is the most used index to measure economic development. It takes the following three factors into account:

1. Health. The HDI measures the average life expectancy in a specific country and compares it to the global average.

2. Education. The HDI measures the mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling in a country.

3. Standard of living. The HDI measures the gross national income (GNI) per head, using the principle of purchasing power parity, PPP.

In determining the HDI, each component has an equal weighting of 33%. The closer the HDI is to 1, the more developed the country is.

The table below shows the top five countries with the highest HDI ranking with their GDP and GDP per capita rankings.

Table 1. HDI, GDP and GDP per capita ranking.

As you can see, despite these countries having the highest ranking in terms of economic development, they do not maintain the highest ranking in GDP, and there is a disparity in GDP per capita which is an indicator of economic growth. This illustrates how a country's level of income and output does not directly translate to a high level of economic development.

As the HDI is the most commonly used measure of economic development, it has many strengths:

Reliable. The information is updated on an annual basis and sourced reliably.

Accurate. The HDI is superior to single indicators as it uses two types of social data (health and education) along with one type of economic data, which gives a broader perspective.

is a very useful tool for governments aiming to devise policies focusing on economic and human development.

These are the main weaknesses of the Human Development Index as a measure of development:

It has been criticized for being too simple and therefore unable to give a real representation of the level of development in an economy. This is backed by the argument that economic and human development are broader concepts with far greater dimensions than the ones captured in the HDI.

Not equally weighted. All the factors used to calculate a country's HDI have equal weight, but t here is a concern that wealth (GNI) still has too much weight in the HDI. This fact leaves room for richer countries to artificially manipulate their rankings. In addition, the GNI does not take into consideration the hidden economy which tends to make up a larger proportion of less developed countries' economies.

The hidden economy involves economic statistics that are not measured by the government and ignore government regulations and rules.

The hidden economy includes legal activities that avoid paying taxes, illegal activities (the sale of stolen goods or drug trafficking), and non-market activities (like having your own fishery).

The hidden economy is also called the underground economy, black market, and shadow economy.

Some other criticisms that the HDI as a development measure has received are:

1. Someone with a high life expectancy could be working a high-risk job for less than average pay.

2. The number of years people spend in school doesn't accurately measure the quality of the education they receive.

3. The HDI alone does not measure the extent of inequality in a country. It is possible to have a satisfactory HDI rank and a huge income gap between the very wealthy and the very poor.

4. The HDI fails to give an account of whether the development is sustainable.

Country Y might be experiencing economic growth and improved living standards, but issues such as pollution and corruption remain.

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) as a measure of development

The Genuine Progress Indicator builds off GDP as an economic indicator by including measures of the impact of economic growth on the environment as well as various social factors. The GPI takes GDP into consideration while also measuring the negative impacts of growth.

In this measurement, resource depletion and degradation are subtracted from the positive impacts of growth to determine the level of development. The GPI tries to get a bigger picture of the average quality of life by measuring information such as housework, parenting, the costs of crimes, and the value of volunteering work.

The Human Poverty Index (HPI) as a measure of development

The Human Poverty Index complements the HDI as it is an indication of the standard of living in an economy. It considers the level of poverty and deprivation of a community in a country. The HPI uses two indices:

1. The HPI-1 is used to measure developing countries.

2. The HPI-2 is used for developed countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The HPI has limited utility as it combines the average deprivation levels of each dimension and it can't be linked to any particular group of people.

The Multidimensional Poverty Index as a measure of development

The MPI replaced the HPI in 2010. It differs from the HPI as it assesses poverty at the individual level.

If one person is deprived of a third or more of ten (weighted) indicators, the global index identifies them as 'MPI poor'. The extent of poverty is measured by the percentage of deprivation a person is experiencing.

Economic happiness and economic growth

Can be happiness linked to economic growth? In economics, measuring happiness is very subjective.

Some of these factors are:

The Gross Domestic Happiness Index

Despite the number of factors that impact happiness and how subjective it is, there is an index that economists use to measure happiness: the

From the neoclassical economic perspective, higher income levels correlate with higher levels of utility and economic welfare, as a person is more able to purchase the goods and services (food, shelter, healthcare, and education) that would improve their quality of life.

'Happiness' is a complicated concept to quantify for measuring purposes, but many economists claim 'psychological surveys' can give a reliable measure of the level of happiness or satisfaction people are experiencing in their lives.

Does economic growth increase happiness?

As for the relationship between happiness and economic growth, the Easterlin P aradox pokes a hole at it. U pon attaining a certain level of per capita income developed countries failed to increase happiness according to the national happiness polls.

I n 2008, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers refuted this paradox, claiming that there was in fact a genuine connection between GDP per capita and happiness.

A country could achieve economic growth thanks to mining, but if they're mining in their natural parks, this will be detrimental to society in the future: people will have fewer natural places to visit and pollution will increase. This, in turn, will affect their health in the long run.

Measures of Development - Key takeaways

The main indicators that measure economic development are:

1. HDI - Human Development Index

2. HPI - Human Poverty Index

3. Multidimensional Poverty Index

4. GPI - Genuine Progress Indicator

The HDI is the most used indicator. It consists of three components: health, education, and standard of living. Each component has an equal weighting of 33%.

The GPI builds off GDP as an economic indicator by including measures of the impact of economic growth on the environment as well as various social factors.

The HPI is a complement to the HDI as it is an indication of the standard of living in an economy. It considers the level of poverty and deprivation of a community in a country.

The Multidimensional Poverty Index assesses poverty at an individual level.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Measuring Development: Meaning, Measures & Methods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You may know that countries are sometimes classified as developed, developing, or emerging. But what does this classification mean? How is a country's development measured? This explanation will cover economic development and how economists measure it. As an economics student, you are must be definitely familiar with economic growth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 15:16•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 14:09•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About ScienceDirect Shopping cart Contact and supportTerms and conditionsPrivacy policy

We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. By continuing you agree to the use of cookies.

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Challenges in assessing urban sustainability

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Achieving urban sustainability has been one of the main goals in European Union policies since 1991, when an expert committee was created for that obj...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Urban environments can sometimes lead to overcrowding and pollution.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Excessive size

Excessive size both in population and geographical area

Where the economic base of the cities is inadequate to cope with problems created by excessive size

Too many people occupying too little space and competing for too few services and jobs

Urban Expansion and Loss of Agriculture land

Tremendous amount of land being gobbled up by sprawl of cites, especially giant conurbation.

The loss of agriculture land to urban/industrial sprawl is of grave concern.

Once loss this prime land cannot be replaced.

Shortage of urban Services

With too many people in the cities, Government are hard pressed to provide All the human services that are the residence would like or expect

Housing shortage occur worldwide

Typically, it is the poorest people who suffer the most

Other basic services Such as piped sewage system hot and cold running water, decent telephone services, reliable city supply, adequate garbage disposal systems.

Educational, Health care and recreational system and facilities.

Slum and Squatter Settlements

Slum are the area of authorized, usually older housing.

While squatter settlements are that unauthorized on land which the squatter do not owns.

The area of tends to lack the essential services of an urban environment such as sewage, water and lighting.

As a result, Squatter settlements commonly are areas of health problems

Traffic congestion

Traffic congestion is a service dilemma that is choking many cities to a standstill in term of movement of people and goods within the cities, with extremely seriously consequences of wastage of resources (Time and energy of people).

Un-employment and under employment

Employment probably top most people lists of serious urban problem.

Hundreds, even thousands of young people may apply for handful of job in a particular company.

The lucky ones may infect, end up with a job that is below their capability, in effect under-employment.

Social and Racial Issues

Unemployment and underemployment along with other factors, breed a variety of subsidiary problems related to racial and social issues.

These vary from region to region.

Environmental Degradation

Pollution of air and water, excessive noise levels, the uglification of the landscape through lack of planning and urban poverty is another serious worldwide problem.

In MDCs people and government are doing something about it.

Thus, in general the degree of urban degradation is most severe today in cities of LDC.The cities with greatest air pollution

Improper sewage disposal contaminated city drinking water which triggered epidemics:

Flushed toilets and sewer systems existed by 1870's but pollution remained due to;

Horse Waste in the streets:

Smoke from Chimneys

Soot and ash from coal and wood fires

A new political system is needed to cope with the new urban problems

Political Machines - informal political group that would provide essential city services in exchange for votes and political power

Offered things like - jobs, housing, food, heat and security

Party bosses would accept bribes from contractors

Some dominated police department

Sold permits to friends to operate public facilities such as railroads, waterworks, and power systems

Example - A politician would find out where the city was planning to build a park - then buy the land and sell it to the city for a profit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Excessive size both in population and geographical area Where the economic base of the cities is inadequate to cope with problems created by excessive size Tremendous amount of land being gobbled up by sprawl of cites, especially giant conurbation. The loss of agriculture land to urban/industrial sprawl is of grave concern.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About ScienceDirect Shopping cart Contact and supportTerms and conditionsPrivacy policy

We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. By continuing you agree to the use of cookies.

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Urban Big Data and the Development of City Intelligence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This study provides a definition for urban big data while exploring its features and applications of China’s city intelligence. The differences betwee…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Luxury Hotel Explosion Reminds World Havana Is in Ruins

The precarious state in which the Cuban communist regime keeps the nation’s infrastructure continues to claim lives. The death toll of the gas explosion that damaged the infrastructure of the Hotel Saratoga in Havana last week has risen to 45.

Christian K. Caruzo

13 May 2022, 9:24 AM PDT 4

West Virginia House Primary Weighs Republican Support for Trump Ahead of November

West Virginia’s Second Congressional District GOP primary on May 10 between the two incumbents, forced to run against each other due to redistricting, will test the Republican roots and support for former President Donald Trump ahead of the November election.

Jacob Bliss

5 May 2022, 10:39 AM PDT 3

Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg To Dole out $450M in Taxpayer-Funded Grants to Clogged U.S. Ports

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced he is awarding $450 million in taxpayer-funded grants in an effort to unclog U.S. ports.

Penny Starr

23 Feb 2022, 7:51 AM PDT 164

Watch: Vulnerable Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger Admits Inflation is a ‘Silent Tax’

Vulnerable Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger (VA) agreed with a constituent during a virtual telephone town hall on Tuesday that the rising cost of inflation is a “silent tax” on Americans.

Jacob Bliss

17 Feb 2022, 8:16 AM PDT 229

Ron DeSantis: ‘Wokeification of Federal Policy’ Destroying the Country

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) criticized the “wokeification of federal policy” when speaking about Washington, DC’s, exorbitant spending bills during a press conference at Honeymoon Island State Park on Tuesday.

Hannah Bleau

1 Feb 2022, 10:21 AM PDT 39

House Democrats Scramble to Find Legislative Wins Before the Midterms

House Democrats are turning their focus to the economy to deal with rising inflation while they look for a legislative “win” before voters go to the polls in the upcoming midterm elections, according to a report.

Jacob Bliss

31 Jan 2022, 12:19 PM PDT 20

Report: Federal Infrastructure Funds Were Not Allocated for Collapsed Pittsburgh Bridge

The Pittsburgh bridge that collapsed early Friday was in poor condition, and the state did not allocate federal infrastructure funds for its improvement, according to a report.

Nick Gilbertson

30 Jan 2022, 12:52 PM PDT 2,231

Man Welcomes Joe Biden with ‘Let’s Go, Brandon!’ Chants During Pittsburgh Visit

President Joe Biden visited a collapsed bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Friday, using the local disaster to promote his infrastructure plan.

Charlie Spiering

28 Jan 2022, 11:37 AM PDT 2,004

Biden to Tout Infrastructure Progress in Pittsburgh as a Pittsburgh Bridge Collapses

President Joe Biden on Friday planned to be in Pittsburgh to tout the progress of infrastructure legislation, as a Pittsburgh bridge collapsed before 7 am.

Wendell Husebø

28 Jan 2022, 7:35 AM PDT 942

Analysis: Republican-led States Ahead of Democrat-led States in Economic Recovery in December

States that have Republican governors and legislatures have overwhelmingly succeeded at leading their state’s economic recovery sooner than the majority of those led by Democrats, according to an analysis of the state-by-state unemployment data from the Department of Labor.

Jacob Bliss

27 Jan 2022, 9:50 AM PDT 220

MSNBC’s Reid: Biden’s Infrastructure Package Was ‘White Guy Employment Act’

MSNBC host Joy Reid said Thursday on her show “The ReidOut” that President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a “white guy employment act.”

Pam Key

20 Jan 2022, 6:14 PM PDT 661

VP Kamala Harris Claims ‘America Is Moving’ While Drivers Stranded on I-95 for over 24 Hours

Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed Tuesday that “America is moving again” as hundreds of drivers remained stranded on I-95 in Virginia thanks to a snowstorm that the mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia struggled to manage.

Jordan Dixon-Hamilton

4 Jan 2022, 8:49 PM PDT 370

Pete Buttigieg Rubs It in: Kamala Harris’s Thankless Portfolio Means She Never Gets Credit for Anything

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Thursday rubbed it in that Vice President Kamala Harris’s thankless portfolio of responsibilities means she will never get credit for anything.

Wendell Husebø

24 Dec 2021, 9:56 AM PDT 127

China: Expressway Flyover Collapses, Sending Trucks Hurling Down into Traffic

An expressway flyover bridge in China’s central Hubei province collapsed and fell onto traffic passing below the bridge on Saturday killing four people and injuring eight others, China’s state-run Global Times reported on Sunday.

Gabrielle Reyes

20 Dec 2021, 5:02 PM PDT 13

Poll: 76% Democrat Capitol Hill Aides Believe Republicans Will Regain House Majority in 2022

An overwhelming majority of senior Democrat Capitol Hill aides believe their party will lose control of the House after the midterms next year, according to a poll taken by Punchbowl News and Locust Street Group.

Jacob Bliss

15 Dec 2021, 2:35 PM PDT 7

Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar’s Primary Challenger Receives More Far-Left Endorsements

Rep. Henry Cuellar’s (D-TX) primary opponent expanded her list of far-left endorsements this week in an attempt to seat a far-left Democrat in his place, despite his voting with his party to enact partisan policies.

Jacob Bliss

9 Dec 2021, 6:03 PM PDT 57

Poll: Democrats Closing Out Year with Dismal Approval Ratings

The Democrat Party is closing out the year with dismal approval ratings from the general public, a Harvard CAPS/Harris survey released this week found.

Hannah Bleau

8 Dec 2021, 2:11 PM PDT 724

Poll: Voters Believe Republicans Can Better Handle Economy, Inflation, Border

Democrats in the House and Senate are in trouble moving into an election year as registered voters say Republicans are better equipped to handle the economy, inflation, and the border, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll.

Jacob Bliss

8 Dec 2021, 1:00 PM PDT 117

Joe Biden Revamps Infrastructure Messaging with ‘Build a Better America’

President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a revamped infrastructure messaging scheme to tout across America as the 2022 midterms approach.

Wendell Husebø

8 Dec 2021, 10:49 AM PDT 189

Democrat Dean Phillips Uses Proxy Vote Because of ‘Public Health Emergency,’ Attends NBA Game Maskless Next Day

Minnesota Democrat Rep. Dean Phillips last week claimed he could not “physically attend” essential House votes due to the “ongoing public health emergency,” but subsequently voted in person the very next day and attended an NBA game in Washington, DC.

Jacob Bliss

7 Dec 2021, 4:17 PM PDT 16

Vulnerable Democrat Rep. Susan Wild Believes Economic Crisis ‘Greatly Exaggerated,’ ‘Great Shape Going into 2022’

Vulnerable Democrat Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) claimed that the economic crisis is being “greatly exaggerated” and America is “in really great shape going into 2022” during an appearance on television this past weekend.

Jacob Bliss

6 Dec 2021, 5:49 PM PDT 32

Democrat Angie Craig Uses Proxy Vote Because of ‘Public Health Emergency,’ Attends NBA Game Maskless 1 Day Later

Vulnerable Minnesota Democrat Rep. Angie Craig claimed she could not attend necessary House votes in person due to the “ongoing public health emergency” but was able to promote the so-called bipartisan infrastructure package with President Joe Biden in her district and attend an NBA game.

Jacob Bliss

6 Dec 2021, 1:32 PM PDT 54

Exclusive–Missouri’s Eric Greitens: ‘I’m the Strongest Supporter of the Second Amendment’

Eric Greitens, Former Missouri Governor, Navy SEAL, and current U.S Senate candidate, told Breitbart News Saturday that a military vaccine mandate “benefits China, it benefits Russia, and it makes all of us less safe.”

Jordan Dixon-Hamilton

4 Dec 2021, 8:07 PM PDT 712

Le Belt und Road: EU Launches €300 Billion Investment Scheme to Take on Communist China

The European Union will launch a €300 billion global infrastructure project in an apparent attempt to counter Communist China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the race for global influence. The Global Gateway scheme, which aims at investing €300 (£255bn/$340) billion into

Peter Caddle

3 Dec 2021, 4:54 AM PDT 41

Democrat Cindy Axne Calls on Pelosi to Address Inflation After Claiming There Was No Problem

Rep. Cindy Axne, the lone vulnerable congressional Democrat from Iowa, reversed course on inflation Thursday, calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to pass legislation addressing the ongoing supply chain problem, which has caused a massive spike in inflation.

Jacob Bliss

2 Dec 2021, 5:33 PM PDT 476

Pete Buttigieg Lavishes Praise on Kamala Harris for Helping Pass Infrastructure Law

As President Joe Biden continues to demonstrate declining popularity and vigor, Washington Democrats and media figures are buzzing about a possible Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg run for president in 2024.

Charlie Spiering

2 Dec 2021, 10:52 AM PDT 156

Republican Matt Mowers Calls on Democrat Chris Pappas to Condemn Bill Gates’ Dark Money Ads

New Hampshire’s First Congressional District candidate Republican Matt Mowers called on vulnerable Democrat Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) to condemn a television ad funded by billionaire Bill Gates’ “dark money” organization on Thursday, thanking the congressman for supporting spending package.

Jacob Bliss

2 Dec 2021, 8:19 AM PDT 9

Pelosi’s Majority Crumbles: Democrat House Transportation Chair Peter DeFazio Will Retire

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chair Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who has been a part of the ongoing infrastructure talks, is calling it quits on the House of Representatives and will retire after his current term in Congress.

Jacob Bliss

1 Dec 2021, 2:47 PM PDT 428

Watchdog Group Investigates Transportation Department Pushing Biden’s Political Agenda

A government watchdog group is known as Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents to investigate if the Department of Transportation violated federal anti-lobbying laws by pushing for items in President Joe Biden’s political agenda to be passed by Congress.

Jacob Bliss

1 Dec 2021, 2:23 PM PDT 9

Report: Christmas Trees Will Cost Up to 30 Percent More this Year

Americans gearing up for the holidays will face inflation at a new level when buying decorations as inflation and the supply chain crisis causing Christmas trees prices to skyrocket.

Jacob Bliss

30 Nov 2021, 3:06 PM PDT 27

Road Trip: Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg Plan Trip to Promote Infrastructure

The two Democrat leaders travel together as rumors intensify about the likelihood of either of the two running for president in the future, once Biden is finished.

Charlie Spiering

29 Nov 2021, 2:42 PM PDT 3,204

Exclusive — Iowa State Sen. Zach Nunn: Democrat Cindy Axne Is Loyal to Nancy Pelosi, Not Iowans

Republican candidate for Iowa’s Third Congressional District and state Sen. Zach Nunn (R), told Breitbart News Saturday that Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA) is only loyal to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and not Iowans.

Jacob Bliss

28 Nov 2021, 11:38 AM PDT 45

Exclusive — Michigan’s Tom Barrett: Democrat ‘Elissa Slotkin Is Not a Moderate’

Republican candidate for Michigan’s new Seventh Congressional District, state Sen. Tom Barrett (R-Charlotte), told Breitbart News Saturday that being elected to Congress would allow him to stand up against President Joe Biden’s partisan agenda.

Jacob Bliss

28 Nov 2021, 10:04 AM PDT 105

NRCC Expands List of Targeted Democrats, Releases Campaign Ads

The NRCC expanded its list of targeted Democrats the committee hopes to flip in the upcoming midterm elections and released new campaign ads to emphasize the rising prices Americans face during Thanksgiving due to the Democrats’ reckless spending.

Jacob Bliss

23 Nov 2021, 1:19 PM PDT 435

Republican Candidate Jesse Jensen Blasts Vulnerable Democrat Kim Schrier’s ‘Rubber Stamp’ on Biden’s Agenda

Washington’s Eighth Congressional District Republican candidate Jesse Jensen blasted vulnerable Democrat Rep. Kim Schrier (D-WA) on Friday for being a “rubber stamp” and voting to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act, the Democrats’ reconciliation infrastructure bill.

Jacob Bliss

20 Nov 2021, 7:52 AM PDT 68

Republican Matt Mowers Slams Vulnerable Democrat Chris Pappas for Abandoning New Hampshire Families with Spending Bill

New Hampshire’s First Congressional District candidate Republican Matt Mowers, slammed vulnerable Democrat Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) on Friday for voting to pass the $1.7 trillion Build Back Better Act, the Democrats’ reconciliation infrastructure bill.

Jacob Bliss

19 Nov 2021, 6:32 PM PDT 33

China: Biden’s $1.2 Trillion in Spending Is ‘Not a Large Amount’

China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday mocked President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill as a “partisan game,” a “political tool,” and nowhere near enough spending to transform America into a command economy like China’s.

John Hayward

17 Nov 2021, 4:04 PM PDT 195

Joe Biden Exaggerates Details of 2004 Fire: My House Burned Down ‘With My Wife In It’

Joe Biden has cited this story before, particularly while talking about the importance of firefighters.

Charlie Spiering

17 Nov 2021, 8:33 AM PDT 2,265

Janet Yellen Warns U.S. Could Hit Debt Limit on December 15

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill could cause the United States to hit its debt limit on December 15.

Jordan Dixon-Hamilton

16 Nov 2021, 6:09 PM PDT 303

DCCC Labels House Republicans ‘Extremist, Dangerous, Chaotic’ as Democrats Flounder in Polls

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) sent out a memo on Monday, touting House Democrats’ supposed accomplishments and maligning House Republicans as “extremist, dangerous, and chaotic” ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

Katherine Hamilton

16 Nov 2021, 5:50 PM PDT 387

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Highlights

*

We analyze land use, sorting, and population density in a polycentric city.

*

The utilized continuous logit model is a random utility model in continuous space.

*

The model predicts incomplete segregation of citizens who work in different business centers and cross commuting.

*

We show that the relative size of income elasticity of both land demand and commuting costs determines income sorting of individuals working in a particular business district.

*

Due to heterogeneous preferences for residence locations and workplaces, this may not hold for the aggregate spatial pattern of multiple income classes.

*

We show that individual land use may decrease as distance between workplace and residence increases.

Abstract

This paper analyzes land use, sorting, and population density in a polycentric city. To this end, the paper develops a continuous spatial choice logit model of a closed polycentric city with multiple income classes and endogenous land use where households select their workplace and residence locations probabilistically. In contrast to the classic urban model with deterministic location choices, the continuous logit model predicts incomplete segregation of citizens who work in different business centers, and, therefore, cross commuting. The relative size of income elasticity of both land demand and commuting costs determines income sorting of individuals working in a particular business district. Due to heterogeneous preferences for residence locations and workplaces, this may not hold for the aggregate spatial pattern of multiple income classes. Finally, individual land use may decrease as distance between workplace and residence increases.

View full text

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Urban land use, sorting, and population density: A continuous logit model

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We analyze land use, sorting, and population density in a polycentric city. * The utilized continuous logit model is a random utility model in continuous space. * The model predicts incomplete segregation of citizens who work in different business centers and cross commuting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 9:17•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Primate Cities, Rank-Size Rule, and more! Size and Distribution of Cities: AP Human Geography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 7:57•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cities, Globalization, and Worldwide Connections! AP human Geography (Advanced Placement)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 0:30•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6.2 Cities Across the World (Unit 6 Cities/Urban Land Use, Topic 2 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6.1 The Origin & Influences of Urbanization (Unit 6 Cities/Urban Land Use, Topic 1 of AP Human Geo)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Posted by Lakisha Aller, Assistant Chief, AMS Livestock, Poultry, and Grain Market News in Initiatives

Dr. Maria Andrade's research led to the introduction of nine drought-tolerant varieties of sweet potatoes to farmers in Mozambique (Photo courtesy of the International Potato Center Sub Saharan Africa)

Each day, USDA employees wake up ready to serve the industry we love - agriculture. As we help farmers, ranchers and foresters move agriculture forward, we remember and recognize the achievements of those who brought us to where we are today. You might think of George Washington Carver or Eli Whitney, but it was also the unknown others - the "Wonder Women" of agriculture - that had a tremendous impact on the world around us.

March is Women's History Month - a celebration dating back to the first National Women's Day on February 29, 1909, in New York. To celebrate, here are a few remarkable women that shaped our lives and love of agriculture.

Harriet Williams Russell Strong (USA, 1844-1926)

Widowed with kids and without any formal education, Harriet pioneered new methods in water conservation and dry land irrigation to supply her walnut, olive and pomegranate plantings. She created several inventions and patents, raised fast-growing pampas grass and sold plumes in her efforts to save her family and ranch from debt. She later became the leading commercial grower of walnuts in the U.S. Her life's work and advocacy for water conservation, irrigation, women's rights and education gained her fame as an inventor, agricultural pioneer, civic leader, philanthropist and advocate for women.

Dr. Mary Engle Pennington (USA, 1872-1952)

The "Ice Woman" of the "Cold Chain" revolutionized the food supply and distribution system by developing safe and sanitary methods for processing, storing and shipping dairy products, poultry, eggs and fish. In addition to instilling food safety and preservation practices, the chemist and engineer helped design and evaluate transportation and storage mediums aimed at maintaining low temperatures to reduce bacteria counts in refrigerated and frozen foods. Mary served President Hoover's Food Administration, USDA, and FDA, as well as the private sector.

Dr. Evangelina Villegas (Mexico, 1924-2017)

Evangelina was a cereal chemist and researcher. She collaborated with plant breeder Dr. Surinder Vasal to develop a variety of maize with increased levels of lysine and tryptophan. Maize is a food staple in developing countries, and with the creation of Quality Protein Maize (QPM) the nutritional and health needs of many people worldwide have been improved. Livestock production also benefited with production gains and more rapid market entrance.

Dr. Temple Grandin (USA, 1947-present)

Temple's life experiences with autism have influenced her work in animal behaviors in relation to handling and facility design at farms, ranches and slaughter plants. She is a well-known advocate for autism and the protections and rights of animals. Being author and co-author to numerous scientific studies, articles and books, she has shed light on animal welfare issues. Her work helped develop the Double Rail Restrainer Conveyor for Livestock Handling, a scoring system to assess animal welfare, and curved corrals used to reduce animal stress, among other designs and best practices.

Dr. Maria Andrade (Cape Verde, 1958-present)

Maria's research led to the introduction of nine drought-tolerant varieties of sweet potatoes to farmers in Mozambique. Along with her colleagues, Dr. Robert Mwanga and Dr. Jan Low, they developed bio-fortified, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. These Vitamin A enriched sweet potatoes were bred to thrive in the varying conditions of Sub-Saharan Africa and to counteract Vitamin A deficiencies. By educating farmers and consumers, Maria and her colleagues bridged the gaps between agriculture, nutrition, and health, ultimately changing the working dynamic of the international community.

There are many fearless women deserving tribute with many more to come as women continue to advance agriculture. In the U.S. alone, 31 percent of farmers are women, farming over 300 million acres with an economic impact of $12.9 billion. Join us in honoring all the amazing women, past and present, who have shaped our lives and love of agriculture. What woman inspires you?

Dr. Mary Engle Pennington revolutionized the food supply and distribution system by developing safe and sanitary methods for processing, storing and shipping dairy products, poultry, eggs and fish.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Each day, USDA employees wake up ready to serve the industry we love - agriculture. As we help farmers, ranchers and foresters move agriculture forward, we remember and recognize the achievements of those who brought us to where we are today.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWBo5X7DZd0

this video discusses the changes in the world that followed the industrial revolution, including tech and economy

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04fty0Q4Sdc

this covers the different ways urban places develop and sustain, and land use

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6.8 Urban Sustainability (Unit 6 Cities/Urban Land Use, Topic 8 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Giqt0Ldswg4

this covers the agricultural change in the way we do things with resources like gmo's and industrial farming

# data[].attributes.body
When you sound out Wrzesinski

# data[].attributes.body
This is refering to how unit 7.2 goes over economic sectors, but they are very comparable to the levels of consumers for science classes.

# data[].attributes.body
This relates to unit 6.2 because megacities can have over 10 million people in the population, but metacities can have over 20 million, exceeding megacities.

# data[].attributes.body
This is representing the theories of the von thunen model, and how placement in the rings affects the outcomes of things like products.

# data[].attributes.body
This refers to geometric boundaries because this game is called geometry dash, and the words being similar reminds me of the game.

# data[].attributes.body
This represents the cultural landscapes idea, and how cultures shape the physical land around them.

# data[].attributes.body
This is referring to how Thomas Malthus and Thanos shared similar ideals, so I made an image of Thomas Malthus as Thanos.

# data[].attributes.body
This is representing how initially you may think there is only one or a few maps,but during unit 1, you find out how many there actually are.

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/rOCelDeW19k
Unit 7 teaches us about the industral and economic development patterns and processes. In the video, it talks abut the industrial revolution and what happened during this revolution. It goes over everything that happened economically an industrially. I got this video off of youtube

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/RnXYOka_fIs
In unit 6, we learn about cities and urban and use patterns and processes. This video talks about patterns and process that happened while we developed history of suburbanization and urbanization. It also covers urban models. I found this video on youtube from someone named Mr. Lee

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Urbanization (Part 1) | AP Human Geography Unit 6 Review in 20 minutes

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/V2yX8T5k9GM
Unit 5 is about agriculture and rural land use patterns and processes. This videos explains the differences between commercial and substance agriculture. I got this video off of youtube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 6:57•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Humans have been benefitting from nature ever since existence on this planet. It cannot be said that the relations between human and nature was in a negative direction initially. Humans settled in local areas while they engaged in agricultural activities and for a long time they applied agricultural techniques without any form of corruption to the balance of nature. As a result of science and technology, human activities have resulted in the disruption and deterioration of the natural attributes linked to the ecosystem. For a certain period, humans were unaware of the damage their activities and methods have brought on the environment. As a result of the vicious change in global climate (global warming), it has come to man's knowledge that his activities has meted immense damage on the environment.

Agricultural activities provide a wide variety of environmental amenities and disamenities. On the positive side, farms provide food, open space and scenery. On the negative side, agricultural activities are major contributors to numerous environmental problems. Nitrate and pesticides runoff impair water quality and degrade habitat for aquatic organisms including fish, affecting commercial fisheries and recreational uses of estuaries, lakes, and streams. Bacterial contamination from animal wastes impairs drinking water quality. Odour from concentrated livestock facility worsens the quality of life in nearby residential areas. Erosion-induced sedimentation of waterways increases drinking water treatment costs and accelerates the need for dredging to maintain navigability. Pesticide exposure causes both acute and chronic illness among farmers and farm workers, while pesticide residues on foods may also threaten human health. Ecological damage from agriculture includes kills of fishes, birds, animals, and invertebrates from pesticides and most important, habitat loss from conversion of wetlands and grasslands. Pesticides also kill bees and thus impair orchard pollination.

Farming is a resource extraction industry. Both crop and livestock production involves harvesting biota, that is, renewable natural resources produced by biological processes. Both utilise as intermediate inputs, a variety of natural resources such as soils, water, genetic material, non-crop plant life, and naturally occurring fauna that mitigates damage caused by pest species. These natural resources may simultaneously influence environmental spillovers from agricultural production like water pollution, pesticide poisonings, or scenic amenities.

Until recently, agriculture was considered a clean industry, largely because farmers' well-being depended on the resource base of agriculture and on local environmental quality. Farmers were thought to be stewards of both in their own self-interest. Even today, stewardship is often invoked as a solution to environmental problems in agriculture, and attempts to popularise more environmentally-friendly farming practices remain the major form of environmental policy in agriculture in developed countries.

Even when explicit markets for environmental quality are lacking, implicit linkages between agricultural productivity and environmental quality may give farmers incentives to provide some environmental protection. Policy discussions have traditionally referred to these incentives under the rubric of stewardship. On the production side, these incentives arise via resources that simultaneously improve both agricultural productivity and environmental quality. The canonical example is soil conservation: Preventing erosion simultaneously preserves long-run land productivity and prevents sedimentation and nutrient pollution of waterways.

About 16% of agricultural land in developing countries is estimated to have suffered serious degradation from erosion, waterlogging, and salinisation, and soil degradation is believed to have caused significant declines in agricultural productivity in a number of countries (Scherr, 1998). Poorly operating credit markets, and in some countries, lack of clear property rights in land appear to be major impediments to investment in land, including soil conservation. Stewardship incentives for soil conservation thus appear to play loss of a role in environmental protection in these countries than in developed countries. Farmers' incentives for avoiding health effects from pesticide use appear less strong in developing countries.
THE WAY FORWARD
It is quite obvious that some of the most serious environmental pressures stem from agricultural intensification. The policy and technological successes and failures of developed countries can be of help to those developing countries that are now suffering the environmental damages of agricultural intensification. Assessing the adverse effects of agricultural practices on the environment, the following proposed solutions can be adopted to combat the various environmental issues it brings:
Reduction of pollution by fertilizer
Developing countries will have to remove a number of distortions, such as direct and indirect subsidies to mineral fertilizer production or sales (e.g. energy subsidies to nitrogen fertilizer). They will also need to phase out low-efficiency fertilizers such as ammonium carbonate, and provide adequate funding to extension services so that they are not even partially dependent on the sale of fertilizer but other organic means of tending for the soil.
Reducing pesticide pollution
A number of lessons can be drawn from past experience of developed countries. First, rigorous testing procedures must be in place to determine the safety of pesticides before they are allowed on the market. Developed countries who have suffered in the past from weaknesses in this regard, should share the pesticide safety information with developing countries through the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) and other mechanisms. In addition, as more developing countries become pesticide producers and develop their own products, it is essential that they implement their own testing, licensing and control procedures.

Second, even where the above measures are in place, environmental problems can arise from the accumulation of pesticide residue along the food chain, in soils and in water. There must be comprehensive and precise monitoring systems to give early warning of residue buildup.

Third, pest control measures should be implemented in a strategic framework for Integrate Pest Management (IPM), which aims to avoid or minimise the use of pesticides.
Improving water management
Water scarcity and intersectoral competition for water are major problems. Reduced groundwater recharge because of deforestation and soil degradation is also an important issue. The most serious direct environmental problem is salinisation. Three main actions could be used to limit salinisation:

1. Greater investment in better drainage and distribution canals, even though planners have been slow to act on this option in the past.

2. Better water management, for example through the increasing involvement of farmers in water users' associations and similar bodies

3. Stronger economic incentives for water conservation, which are growing as governments increasingly implement water-pricing policies and as competition from other sectors drives up the price.

Promotion of organic farming
While the technological approaches described above are measures to reduce the negative effect of conventional agriculture on the environment, organic agriculture (for environmental reasons) does not use any industrial fertilizer or pesticide inputs at all. The use of such inputs commonly has negative impacts on the environment; however, their non-use does not necessarily make agricultural production sustainable.

The environmental and economic benefits of organic farming can be increased in a number of ways. These include introduction of policies that bring prices of industrial inputs in line with their full economic costs, including externalities; improvements in product standards, certification and labeling to give consumers confidence that they are buying genuine organic foods (FAO, 1999F); establishment of an internationally agreed accreditation mechanism, particularly procedures to gain international equivalence of organic product standards; greater government assistance to farmers wishing to switch to organic farming; regulations to enforce or encourage the use of organic farming as a means of overcoming or reducing problems such as the buildup of nitrate in groundwater; increased research to widen the range of organic agricultural techniques; improvements in the availability of or access to organic inputs, e.g. rock phosphate and manure.
Improving livestock waste management
The main actions required here include:

Development of national strategies for livestock waste management to provide the general framework for local action; improved policy and regulatory framework, with clearly defined and enforceable discharge and emission standards and effective waste disposal charges; meaningful penalties for breaches in regulations, and an expanded range of economic instruments to discourage poor livestock waste management, e.g. pollution taxes to limit waste discharges from livestock farms and fisheries; well-targeted programmes to disseminate best practices; strengthened guidelines to optimise the location of livestock production units and to prohibit the development of certain types of intensive livestock units in unsuitable areas; increased support for the adoption and dissemination of appropriate technological measures, with emphasis on introducing better techniques for livestock waste management to achieve adequate livestock waste management; and improved donor coordination and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to ensure that international projects have adequate provision for sound livestock waste management.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
EFFECTS OF AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES ON ENVIRONMENT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
PREAMBLE: Humans have been benefitting from nature ever since existence on this planet. It cannot be said that the relations between human and nature was in a negative direction initially.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Environmental Impacts of Agricultural Modifications | National Geographic Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With the human population soaring out of control, agriculture must follow suit. But the innovations that boost crop yields carry ecological costs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Highlights

*

Tropical soybeans increased Brazil's agricultural GDP by 4%-6%.

*

The local impact of tropical soybeans on agricultural employment was large.

*

The aggregate impact on agricultural employment, however, was small.

*

General equilibrium effects were critical for the impact of tropical soybeans.

*

International trade was crucial for the GDP gains from tropical soybeans.

Abstract

This paper studies how regional productivity shocks in agriculture propagate to the rest of the economy via trade and migration linkages, shaping their aggregate effects on GDP, welfare, and agricultural employment. Using comprehensive agricultural data from Brazil, I estimate a general equilibrium model with a rich spatial structure to evaluate the effects of a critical shock in modern agriculture: the adaptation of soybeans to tropical regions. Results show that this shock increased Brazil's agricultural GDP by 4%-6%, with the bulk of this impact coming from international trade. Because soybeans are land-intensive relative to other agricultural sectors, agricultural employment fell in tropical regions to which soybeans expanded. In other parts of the economy, however, agricultural employment rose substantially. Additionally, I show that general equilibrium effects have important implications for the analysis of the returns to agricultural research and the evaluation of the reduced-form effects of productivity shocks on agricultural employment.

Data availability

Data and the codes available online at "openicpsr". See link on author's website https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/161163/version/V1/view.

View full text

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trade, productivity, and the spatial organization of agriculture: Evidence from Brazil

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tropical soybeans increased Brazil's agricultural GDP by 4%-6%. * The local impact of tropical soybeans on agricultural employment was large. * The aggregate impact on agricultural employment, however, was small. * General equilibrium effects were critical for the impact of tropical soybeans. * International trade was crucial for the GDP gains from tropical soybeans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Agricultural regions/Agriculture Part 3 (AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Green Revolution! AP Human Geography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The SECOND AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION! AP Human Geography (Advanced Placement)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The SECOND AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION! AP Human Geography (Advanced Placement)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Figures - uploaded by Peter J Atkins

Author content

All figure content in this area was uploaded by Peter J Atkins

Content may be subject to copyright.

Discover the world's research

20+ million members

135+ million publications

700k+ research projects

Join for free

Atkins, P.J., Simmons, I.G. and Roberts, B.K. (1998) People, Land and Time London:

Hodder Arnold ISBN: 0340677147 and 0470236590

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780340677148/

CHAPTER 2 THE ORIGINS AND SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

‘Within a few thousand years of the sowing of the first crops, the threshold of

literacy had been crossed in several distinct territories and some of the great

traditions of mankind [sic] had been launched...That is why prehistorians have

come to view the attainment of farming as a phenomenon comparable in

importance with the industrial and scientific revolutions...’. Clark, G. (1969)

World prehistory: a new outline Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

INTRODUCTION

No other single change in human history can have had a greater effect upon the landscape

than the domestication and global spread of plants and animals. The discovery of agriculture

was an important developmental threshold since its associated economies provided the basis

for the early stages of civilization. In this chapter we will review current knowledge of the

origins of agriculture and its dispersion, in order to understand the variety of manipulated

agro-ecosystems (see also Chapter 13) that have changed the face of the earth.

WHERE?

The question of where useful plants and animals were domesticated and exploited in an

agricultural economy has generated heated debate. Nineteenth century writers from the

Christian tradition assumed that the lands of the Bible, commonly known as the Fertile

Crescent (Figure 2.1), were the fount of ancient innovation. Such notions have been very

powerful, not least because there is much evidence that the Middle East was indeed very

important in the domestication of the cereal species, especially wheat and barley, and

animals such as sheep and cattle, all of which later were to become key staple items in the

diets of western, developed nations.

Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanical geneticist, in 1926 proposed that a number of different

centres could be identified where groups of plants originated in conditions of ecological

diversity, in niches which suited their particular requirements. After some refinement he

located these foci in south west Asia, China, India and south east Asia, Ethiopia, Mexico, the

Andes, and the Mediterranean. His disciples later added other centres, culminating in J.G.

Hawkes’ codification (Table 2.1) of four nuclear centres, where agriculture emerged at an

early date; ten regions of diversity, where genetic variety is substantial but cultivation came

later; and eight minor centres, where a few crops were domesticated.

Table 2.1 Hawkes’ nuclear centres and regions of diversity

Solomon Islands, Fiji, South

Pacific

Source: Hawkes, J.G. (1983) The diversity of crop plants Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press

Carl Sauer writing in 1952 identified two primary hearths, in tropical south east Asia and

northern south America, with widespread diffusion to the rest of the world. This is a

complex question: human beings have always had the singular capacity for picking up ideas

from each other and from other groups. This is well-attested, indeed documented, with

regard to the alphabet, a system of writing in which sounds are represented by symbols. In a

similar manner the idea of plant domestication has spread, involving both the actual spread of

domesticates and the application of the concepts to local varieties. Furthermore, we must not

imagine that any of these processes, the use of potential domesticates, their husbandry and

domestication or their diffusion throughout their natural range nor their introduction into

other environments, were wholly pragmatic. The domestication of plant and animals are

both intricately linked with religion and ritual and underlie many myths, a somewhat

derogatory word applied to other peoples’ religions.

The implication of this Vavilovian hypothesis was that peoples in different parts of the world

were quite capable of domesticating their own local species, independent of imports of

genetic materials or ideas from outside. As a compromise, we now think that primary

domestications were widespread, but that there was a significant element of secondary

diffusion of ideas about domestication and of the plants and animal domesticates themselves.

Geographical diversity is well illustrated by Table B1.2.2 of the origins of the major

cultivated crops and animals. These can be divided into founder species, such as wheat,

barley, maize, sheep and goats, and secondary species which were developed later when the

idea of domestication for settled agriculture was well established. Subsequent diffusions of

domesticates have broadened their distribution and led to further developments of varieties

suited to local conditions. About 1,900 crop species have been domesticated all told.

Not all of the qualities of domesticates were necessarily improvements. The body size of

domesticated animals, for instance, is always smaller than their wild ancestors. This is due to

selection for docility and the inability of early farmers to provide sufficient fodder for bulky

animals. Until the advent of biotechnology, breeding has always involved a trade-off

of characteristics according to which were most desirable.

THE MIDDLE EAST AND DOMESTICATION

Why did Neolithic peoples bother to domesticate when we know that a wide variety of foods

was available to them in the wild? A number of hypotheses have been advanced but it should

be noted that none can yet be said to be conclusive.

Demographic expansion with consequent pressure upon available resources is one of the

most quoted explanations, however the evidence is not favourable. Archaeological work in

both the Old and New Worlds has found that numbers of people remained low and stable

until after the establishment of full agriculture. So population increase was an effect rather

than a cause. Low fertility among hunter-gatherers continues to be common today.

Environmental factors are more persuasive. In the 1920s Gordon Childe proposed a stress or

desiccation theory, where people were supposedly forced into close proximity with plants

and animals by a change to greater dryness at the end of the Ice Age. Modern environmental

historians give some credence to this, for instance in the Middle East where the transition

(about 10,000 B.C.) from the last Ice Age (Pleistocene) to the post-glacial (Holocene) saw a

change to climatic conditions which encouraged the spread and multiplication of the wild

ancestors of domesticates. Winters became warmer but there was also an extreme seasonal

variability of moisture which favoured annual plants, such as the cereal grasses, rather than

perennials. A subsequent episode of cooling, 9-8,000 B.C., caused ecological stress and may

have encouraged a shift to more labour-intensive resource extraction and the development of

new technologies (Byrd 1994).

Table 2.2 The probable geographical origins of the major crops and animals

South West Asia

Wheat (8000), barley (8000), fig (7800), pea (7800), lentil (7800), chickpea (7500), flax (7500), broad bean

(6500), date (4000), olive (3700), grape vine (3200), rye (3000), also cauliflower, kale, garlic, turnip, mustard,

rape, bitter vetch, pear, citron, pomegranate, almond, pistachio. Dog (12,000), sheep (9000), goat (7500),

dromedary (2000).

Central Asia

Buckwheat, carrot, radish, apple, cherry, walnut, alfalfa, hemp. Horse (4000), bactrian camel (1500), yak.

Central America

Squash (8000), common bean (8000), avocado (7200), maize (5700), amaranth (5200), gourd (5000), runner

bean (4000), tomato, sieva bean, papaya, agave, cacao, vanilla. Muscovy duck.

South America

Common bean (8500), pepper (8500), potato (8-6000), Lima bean (6500), oca (6000), quinoa, cañihua, guava,

peanut, pineapple, tobacco, rubber. Llama (4000), alpaca (4000), guinea pig (1500).

North America

Sunflower, cranberry, blueberry, pecan. Turkey.

Africa

African rice, sorghum, pearl millet, teff, okra, lettuce, watermelon, cowpea, castor bean, coffee, sesame, kola

tree, oil palm. Donkey, guinea fowl.

India

Pigeon pea, moth bean, rice bean, horse gram, asparagus bean, aubergine, cucumber, pepper, lemon, jute, indigo.

China

Rice (6000), foxtail millet (5500), peach (4000), soya bean (1000), mung bean, adzuki bean, leaf mustard,

horseradish, Chinese cabbage, spinach, ginger, orange, mulberry, lotus, water chestnut.

South East Asia

Mango (7200), taro (7000), banana, lime, satsuma/tangerine, tea, clove, nutmeg.

South Pacific/Australasia

Coconut (3000), arrowroot, breadfruit, macadamia nut.

Europe

Oats, beet, mangel, plum, cherry, raspberry, strawberry. Reindeer.

More than one centre

Chili pepper (C. America & Amazonia, 4100), cabbage and other brassicas (China & Europe, 3750),

manioc/cassava/yuca (C. America & Amazonia, 7-5000), sweet potato (C. America & Amazonia, 2500), cotton

(C. America & Amazonia), yam (Amazonia & Africa), onion (China & S.W. Asia), sugarcane (India, S.E. Asia &

S. Pacific), apricot (China, S.W. Asia), muskmelon (Africa, S.W. Asia). Cattle (S.W. Asia, Europe, India, 6500),

pig (S.W. Asia, Europe, S.E. Asia, China, 7000), buffalo (India, S.E. Asia, 2500), chicken (S.E. Asia, China,

India, 6000), duck (Africa, Europe, China), goose (Africa, Europe).

Sources: various

Note: All dates given are B.C.

Global climatic change after the Ice Age might help to explain why agriculture appeared

independently within a relatively short time in several different parts of the globe, but it is

only one of several factors. The others according to McCorriston & Hole (1991) were:

 the availability of the technology to use plants effectively, especially harvesting,

processing and storage technologies amongst hunting, gathering and fishing

communities;

 the social organization (in villages) able to cope with delayed return economies,

where there were gaps of months between sowing and harvesting;

 an incentive to shift from hunting and gathering.

The balance of resources available to these early peoples was certainly changing. In the

southern part of the Fertile Crescent the sea level was rising and several large inland lakes

were drying out. Game was probably becoming harder work to hunt and of course it

remained problematic to store the proceeds. Wild plant foods were already providing a

bridge for the seasonal hungry gaps but at some stage it may have become essential to turn to

cultivation as a means of continued subsistence. Cereal porridge cannot have been much of

an alternative to rump steak and it seems to have provided only a meagre existence. The

early neolithic farmers were less well nourished than their ancestors and it is unlikely that

they would have volunteered to become specialist agriculturalists if realistically they could

have continued with their previous way of life.

In this region, wild grasses, including the relatives of modern wheat and barley, thrive in a

wide arc from west to east. Figure 2.2 depicts the slightly different distributions of wild

einkorn (Triticum boeoticum), and wild two-row barley (Hordeum spontaneum), which each

have their own tolerances of climatic and other limitations. Wild emmer wheat (Triticum

dicoccoides) has approximately the same distribution as barley. In the years of abundant

moisture, stands of these primitive cereals are dense and may yield as much as 500 kg per

hectare, more than enough to attract the interest of people with a gathering and storage

economy.

Interestingly, the size of wild and cultivated emmer grains is not dissimilar. Domestication’s

principal contribution was to eliminate the inconvenient characteristic of a brittle rachis, the

segmented axis attaching the seed spikelets to the stem, which in the wild ensured that the

grains fell from the plant when ripe and thus guaranteed another annual cycle of growth.

Grain which was held slightly longer on the plant would have had a higher probability of

being selected and, by planting that as seed, early farmers would have perpetuated and

eventually concentrated a natural genetic characteristic, enabling them to extend the

harvesting season. This process could have been completed within a few decades.

Accidental crossing with goatface grass later produced the genetically more complex bread

wheat (Triticum aestivum), a plant with greater hardiness and a grain which can be more

easily threshed.

Two-row barley and emmer wheat appeared first in domesticated form at Jericho (Palestine)

and Tell Abu Hureyra (Syria) sometime around 8,000 B.C. (in the cultural phase called Pre

Pottery Neolithic A) and emmer, einkorn, peas and lentils at Tell Aswad (Syria) in 7,800

B.C.. Cultivated grasses and pulses became widespread in the Middle East during the

following millennium, in the Pre Pottery Neolithic B.

The precise mechanism of how the transition was made from gathering wild seeds to

cultivating them and selecting desired traits is not at all clear. The growth of healthy and

perhaps high-yielding plants from discarded seeds on nitrogen-rich household waste dumps

must have been observed, but not all species have this weedy habit. Another consideration

may have been that wild stands were diminishing under pressure from gathering and needed

supplementation from additional sowings.

The case of animals is at least as complex: there is a fundamental distance between the

hearth animals - the dog and the pig - and herd animals, cattle and sheep. The former were

brought to the hearth when their parents had been killed, for curiosity, status and perhaps

even the ‘Aaah’ factor, perhaps suckled by the women (as does happen in simple traditional

societies), raised with the family and then either playing an economic role in hunting or

scavenging, finally being killed and eaten. Here animals pose more of a problem: the young

must have been taken, or perhaps, in the case of cattle, small herds were corralled for ritual

purposes, the stock being reduced in size and ferocity by the sacrifice of the king bull. Table

2.3 lists the four key characteristics that an animal species needs to become a candidate for

domestication.

Table 2.3 The necessary characteristics for animal domestication

 Non-specialized feeding habits

 Must reproduce readily

 Non-territorial so that can be kept in groups

 Submissive social animals with a dominance hierarchy

Source: Smith (1995, 26-7)

As villages (in what is now Palestine, Jordan and Syria) supplemented temporary hunting

camps during the Natufian era (10,500-8,500 B.C.), a more sedentary lifestyle would have

reduced the geographical territory which could be exploited and therefore a more intensive

resource utilization was required. Cultivation offered one such option, pastoralism another.

Surely, social developments were important here, providing a basis on which people could

live together cooperatively.

Natufian villages were five to ten times larger than previously and their component houses

had a permanent architecture with provision for both storage and religious ceremony. Their

walls were made of stone and mud, with timber posts holding up a roof structured with joists.

Cemeteries appeared for the first time, suggesting an attachment to place and a collective

thought process.

The inhabitants had sharpened stone sickle blades for harvesting, and even mortars, pestles

and grinding stones for processing grain. The heavy tooth wear observable on excavated

skulls shows the consumption of a gritty flour. There may even have been some delibera te

cultivation (Unger-Hamilton 1989), although at this stage it would have been of unimproved

plants.

Despite a higher strontium content in Natufian skeletons than earlier periods, evidence of an

increased contribution of plants to the diet, the people in these villages continued to derive

much of their nutrition from hunting wild game. There is no evidence yet of animal

domestication, although it is possible that wild gazelle and fallow deer were managed by

selective hunting and perhaps corralling.

By 6,000 B.C. animals had joined the new economy in a morphological form quite distinct

from the wild (shorter bones, altered horn shape). They were domesticated first in

Turkey/Syria: sheep about 9,000 B.C., pigs 7,000 B.C., and cattle 6,000-5,000 B.C.. Goats

were exploited by 7,500 B.C. in the hilly flanks of the Zagros Mountains where a different

economic path had been followed. The opportunities for gathering cereals were less here

than in the Levant and instead an initial phase of intensive hunting seems eventually to have

led to a form of nomadic animal husbandry, in which sheep and goats were domesticated

from locally common feral stocks (Figure 2.3).

David Harris has sketched out an evolutionary continuum (Figure 2.4) which helps us to

understand the likely stages of transition to agriculture in its fullest sense. His model draws

its motive power from the greater inputs of human energy. Sedentarism, settlement size,

population density, and social complexity are all correlated with a greater intensification of

the cultivation process, although there are no simple cause and effect linkages, nor any

guarantee that the sequence was linear.

CASE STUDY: MESOAMERICA

To move away from a classic hearth in the Middle East, with all that this implies in light of

the region’s long cultural dominance, the mountainous environment of central Mexico may

not sound a promising birth place of agriculture but in fact it presented prehistoric peoples

with a wide range of juxtaposed plant resources in a region of ecological diversity. The

Basin of Mexico and the valleys of Tehuacan and Oaxaca (Figure 2.5) in particular offered

niches ranging from lake shores to semi-arid vegetated slopes. At first their inhabitants were

broad-spectrum hunter-gatherers living in nomadic microbands, who only gradually

developed a dependence upon a plant foods. We should remember that a generation was

probably little more than 20 years, and lifetimes were mainly under 30 years, so that the rate

of change during an individual’s lifespan was infinitesimally slow. Eventually food supplies

centred on a trinity of domesticates: maize, beans and squashes (relatives of pumpkins)

which, when fully developed, has provided a very successful basis for the agricultural

economy in much of central and south America for the last 3,500 years and are still important

elements in our own diet. Maize is deficient in the essential amino-acids lysine and

methionine, and beans lack tryptophan and cystine, but together they provide a balanced diet.

The three became part of a system in which the use of farm land was maximised, with the

maize growing tall and straight on the planting mound, a bean planted close so as to climb up

its stalk, and a squash plant at ground level with its broad leaves shading out competitive

weed growth.

Squash appears to have been domesticated first, but it was the cultivation of maize from

about 5,200 B.C. which was of the most significance. The provenance of maize is still the

subject of debate, but Doebley (1990) has discovered a close genetic similarity to the wild

grass teosinte. The main problem is that teosinte is not appetizing, nor is it ever likely to

have produced as heavy a wild harvest as the ancestors of wheat and barley did in the Middle

East, where 60-80 kg per hectare seems to have been possible. Most likely it was a starvation

food which was collected and then cultivated only as a fall-back if all other resources failed

in dry years. It either gradually responded to cultivation by human selection each year of the

largest cobs or threw up a chance mutation with a much better yield. Either way it is thought

to have taken 4,000 years or so before yields per hectare were sufficient to support

specialized, settled agricultural communities. There were no suitable animals for

domestication in highland Mexico, another disadvantage vis à vis the Middle Eastern farmers

who employed a mixed economy in which dung and crop residues were swapped to restore

soil fertility and produce captive sources of animal protein.

SPREAD AND IMPACT

Although the cultivation of founder crops such as wheat and maize was discovered

independently in different parts of the world, the geographical gaps were filled by diffusion.

This would have been either by the migration of people, taking their farming with them, or by

the passing on of ideas, perhaps through cultural contact or trade. The number of crop

species was multiplied when enterprising farmers experimented with further cultivars such as

pulses, legumes, root crops, leaf vegetables and fruits. The process was very slow however,

with Finland about 6,000 years behind the Middle East in the adoption of arable farming. In

fact, the colder, moister northern latitudes of Europe were so different that the crops

themselves had to be modified by the slow process of breeding in order to produce spring-

sown varieties that could cope with conditions much colder and wetter than would have

suited their wild ancestors.

But did the idea of agriculture spread or was there a migration of agriculturalists taking their

technology with them? Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza (1995) argue for the latter on the

basis of their new and exciting work on human genetics. By taking sample measurements of

the frequencies of 95 human genes in different European regions, they have created statistical

maps of the similarities between neighbouring groups. Figure 2.6 is one of these maps,

which they claim reflects the spread of genetic material from the Middle East. Maps of the

evolution and spread of languages show similar patterns (Renfrew 1996).

The slow nature of this expansion diffusion is not at all surprising. Although the notion of

producing food was attractive, no doubt especially for any politically minded élite who

wished to dominate the increasingly sedentary pockets of population. In summary, by 2,000

B.C. there were, nevertheless, many practical problems. The ecological conditions in the

well-watered valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt, for instance, required more sophisticated

techniques of moisture control than the hilly, semi-arid regions of primary origin, and

agriculture there seems to have spread only gradually along the belt of hydromorphic soils

(formed in the presence of water). Wheat and barley made an appearance along the Tigris-

Euphrates in the seventh millennium B.C., and in the Nile Valley by 6,000 B.C.. It was these

fertile, irrigable lands which were to provide a breeding ground for the first civilizations

(Chapter 3).

An early diffusion eastwards took barley, sheep, goats and cattle to the Kachhi Plains of

Pakistan by 7,000 B.C., but not to the Indus until 3,500 B.C.. Meanwhile in northern China

an entirely separate but parallel history of domestication saw the use of rice, millet, cabbage,

pigs, chickens and fruits. In Africa a number of indigenous species were domesticated at an

early date and agriculture was widespread north of the Equator by 2,000 B.C..

In south America the evidence is debatable but earliest estimates have squash, beans and

peppers under human control by 8,500 B.C., with maize entering the diet in the seventh

millennium. Manioc was first grown in the upper Orinoco valley sometime between 7,000

and 5,000 B.C., and about 3,000 B.C. agriculture high up in the Andes was based on grains

such as quinoa, tarwi and cañihua, and roots including ullucu, mashua and oca. From 7,000

B.C. meat came in the form of domesticated llama, guanaco, vicuña (all camelids) and the

guinea pig. But only the potato from this remarkable Andean complex has been received

with enthusiasm in the wider world.

In summary, by 2,000 B.C. most of the major crops used for human food today had been

domesticated and some had been taken beyond their natural range by migrating peoples or by

the processes of cultural diffusion and commercial trade. The latter is likely to have been

increasingly important as well-organized societies sent traders and emissaries further afield to

seek resources complementary to their own. In the historic era, the Islamic empire traded

widely and collected plants with the intention of their exploitation in different environments.

Thus rice and citrus fruits came to the Mediterranean from east Asia. There were further

important developments in the age of exploration which was initiated in the fifteenth century

by naval powers such as Portugal and Spain (Chapter 21). The real purpose of European

outreach, apart from seeking gold and converts to Christianity, was the discovery of routes to

the sources of spices and other goods in south, south east and east Asia. There was a

dissatisfaction with the mix of temperate and Mediterranean products available and a

solution was to trade more widely and to dominate the sources of exotic resources. Thus,

imperial expansion in the Americas in the sixteenth century yielded crops such as maize and

potatoes, which could be grown in European conditions and there were many species

exported (consciously or accidentally) in the other direction, including weeds and pests

(Clark 1949, 1959).

In recent centuries it has been the global empires, first of colonialism and later of

transnational capitalism, which have been primarily responsible for plant dispersals.

Cultigens have been carried to new regions both for profit and for ornament. Many of the

species in European gardens, for instance, have been gathered from around the world by plant

hunters. Botanical gardens played a role, acting as coordinators of expeditions and offering

propagation facilities. Their interest was not always altruistic, however, as in the case of the

theft of seeds of the rubber tree by the British in 1876, who wished to establish plantations in

Malaya, thus undermining an existing Brazilian monopoly.

The exchange of genetic material continues to this day, especially in the form of seeds of

high-yielding varieties of crops and pedigree animals for breeding purposes, but the global

network of trade, by allowing quick and efficient transport from an area of origin with some

comparative advantage such as climate, has reduced the need to carry plants beyond their

normal range. The forcing of tropical fruits and flowers in carefully tended and heated

greenhouses, so popular among the wealthy in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, is

now a thing of the past. The globalization of trade in food products may have introduced a

greater variety of exotic species (known in the trade as queer gear) to our supermarket

shelves but our diets remain dominated by the narrow range of crops whose origins lie in the

Middle East and the Americas (Table 2.4).

Table 2.4 Percentage of world food crop area devoted to crops from eleven source

regions (excluding fruits and nuts)

South West Asia 31.5

Central Asia 0.1

Central America 13.2

South America 16.4

North America 1.5

Africa 5.3

India 0.3

China 8.0

South East Asia 4.5

South Pacific 0.0

Europe 0.7

More than one centre 18.5

Source: data from F.A.O., Production Yearbook, 1993 Rome: F.A.O.

In a similar manner, livestock have also been widely spread around the world. Cattle have

become almost universal, bifurcating as they spread into taurus (short-horn and long-horn)

and zebu (humped) sub-types. Descendants of the short-horns are popular especially in

temperate latitudes and the zebu is better adapted to tropical climates. The south Asian

buffalo, another milk/meat/draught species, has been less popular beyond the sub-continent,

although one of its products, mozzarella cheese, garnishes pizzas all over the world.

THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPES

One of the great puzzles of agriculture is why two areas of very similar environmental

characteristics often develop very different crop and livestock systems. We will investigate

this further by comparing the rice growing region of Tamilnadu in south east India with the

rainfed grain cultivation of eastern Tanzania, which is in east Africa.

These regions are of similar size and lie at the roughly the same latitude north and south of

the equator. Both have extensive plains cutting across crystalline rocks, with shallow,

seasonally wet valleys and better drained watersheds between (Figure 2.7). There are

residual geological features rising from the plains in the form of isolated inselbergs or larger

ranges of hills rising to over 2,000 metres. Tamilnadu has a higher mean annual temperature,

but only by 2C. Mean annual rainfall varies between 800-1300 mm for eastern Tanzania

and 550-1300 mm for Tamilnadu, decreasing inland in both cases. Both have similar natural

vegetation, at least that is before human interference.

FIGURE 2.8 Although there are similarities in the physical environment, the human use of the land in (a) eastern

Tanzania and (b) Tamilnadu is very different, as summarized in these idealized models

Source: Morgan, W.T.W. 1988: Tamilnadu and eatern Tanzania: comparative regional geography and the

historical development process. Geographical Journal 154, 69-86

But the agriculture of these two regions is very different (Figure 2.8). It seems that history

has had a major rôle to play. The population density in Tamilnadu is twenty times greater, as

a result of the development of a highly sophisticated civilization from an early date. There

were cities and trade was extensive, to the west with the Romans and later the Arabs, and to

the east with south east Asia. There were major irrigation works on the coast by A.D. 900,

tanks, wells and canals and these spread to the interior by A.D. 1350.

Tamilnadu has long had a stable culture, which is strongly religious and based around its

magnificent temples (Figure 2.9). Warfare between historic rival kingdoms was less

destructive than the inter-tribal conflict experienced in Tanzania. Eastern Tanzania was also

on trade routes (for ivory, cloves and slaves), but it was more of a cul-de-sac. Traders did not

penetrate regularly inland until the mid nineteenth century and political integration did not

come until German sovereignty was declared in 1885. In the twentieth century cash crop

exports have developed, including coffee, cotton and sisal.

There is no reason why rice could not have been grown in eastern Tanzania. Wild rice grows

there and rice is cultivated commercially in Madagascar further south. Its present rainfed

agriculture could therefore be greatly intensified. There is also potential for the transfer of

simple intermediate agricultural technologies from Tamilnadu to Tanzania. Tank irrigation

is one example of this (Figure 2.10). Water resources in Tamilnadu are used to their limit but

much water is unused in eastern Tanzania. A limiting factor for such improvements is the

lack of population in Tanzania not an excess.

In conclusion, we might say that environmental constraints are important in limiting the

potential of agriculture, but in similar environments it is historical development and human

organization that matter most.

CONCLUSION: THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRE-INDUSTRIAL AGRO-

ECOSYSTEMS

The gradual spread of agricultural plants, animals and techniques to all the inhabited

continents replaced what had been successful hunting and gathering economies. Small,

scattered bands were no match for the technical superiority, social complexity and aggression

which eventually characterised established, sedentary farming. As Chapter 1 has shown,

hunter-gatherers remain only in the least accessible parts of the globe, indeed, the very

existence of many tribes is under threat, their only chance of survival being to make an

accommodation with the agents of so-called civilization, perhaps by agreeing to retreat to

regulated reservations.

The agro-ecosystems which replaced mesolithic economies were slow to mature. Their

development depended upon a number of factors, the first among which is the natural

environment. The relationship between people and the ecosystem they wish to modify to

their advantage is crucial. The difference between success and failure has proved to be a

narrow one, especially in marginal areas where over-exploitation can reduce sustainability

(see Chapter 6). Finding the right balance was often a matter of trial and error.

Second, technology is crucial, especially in the pre-industrial phase, involving these

apparently simple tools used for cultivation, processing, storage and transport. For instance,

the plough was a Eurasian innovation of the temperate and sub-tropical arable lands where

draught animals were available: it brought the power of a specialist domesticate, the ox (a

castrated bull) to bear in both the varied soils of the Middle East and Mediterranean zones

and eventually the rich forest soil of temperate Europe. Universally its use was accompanied

by forest clearance, whereas the hoe and digging stick required less disturbance of vegetation

and could be used in wooded areas and on steep slopes. Use of the plough does not

necessarily imply intensification per unit area, but its use of labour was efficient. At first, the

intensification of output was more noticeable in those areas employing water control,

especially canal irrigation and water lifting devices. It was these areas where the earliest

agricultural based urban civilisation flowered and where population densities were the

greatest (see Chapter 4).

Third, the ownership of land has been important, varying from public control in ancient

Egypt, and collective decision-making in many tribal and socialist societies, to the private

rights exercised by landlords and owner-occupiers. The power to decide how to farm has

been pivotal in history, as has the power to mobilize labour and capital.

Geographical location is the fourth factor. It should be clear by now that spatial diffusion

supplemented the independent domestication of plants and animals. The spread of seeds and

live animals by trade, along with the migration of peoples, were responsible to a certain

extent for the more urgent pace of change in some parts of the globe than others. Even two

areas of similar environmental characteristics may thus develop very different crop and

livestock systems.

FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES

Much has been published on agricultural origins and spread, but no single volume captures

the full range of ideas in non-technical language. Sauer (1952) is still a good read and Harris

(1996) is an up-to-date collection of papers on the Middle Eastern hearth. Smith (1995) is a

well-written introductory text.

Byrd, B.F. (1994) From early humans to farmers and herders: recent progress on key

transformations in southwest Asia, Journal of Archaeological Research 2, 221-53

Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. & Cavalli-Sforza, F. (1995) The great human diasporas: the history of

diversity and evolution Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley

Clark, A.H. (1949) The invasion of New Zealand by people, plants and animals: the South

Island New Jersey: Rutgers University Press

Clark, A.H. (1959) Three centuries and the island: a historical geography of settlement and

agriculture in Prince Edward Island, Canada Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Doebley, J. (1990) Molecular evidence and the evolution of maize, pp 6-28 in Bretting, P.K.

(Ed.) New perspectives on the origin and evolution of New World domesticated

plants, Economic Botany 44, Supplement

Harris, D.R. (Ed.)(1996) The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia

London: UCL Press

McCorriston, J. & Hole, F. (1991) The ecology of seasonal stress and the origins of

agriculture in the Near East, American Anthropologist 93, 46-69

Renfrew, C. (1996) Language families and the spread of farming, pp 70-92 in Harris, D.R.

(Ed.) The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia London:

UCL Press

Sauer, C.O. (1952) Agricultural origins and dispersals New York: American Geographical

Society

Smith, B.D. (1995) The emergence of agriculture New York: W.H. Freeman

Unger-Hamilton, R. (1989) The epi-palaeolithic southern Levant and the origins of

agriculture, Current Anthropology 30, 88-103

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

Brian F. Byrd

Archaeologists conducting research on the Pleistocene and early Holocene prehistory of Southwest Asia have made a formidable series of new discoveries and fresh insights since 1987. This article examines recent progress and shortcomings on a series of diachronic research topics, including the transition to modern humans, the development of late Pleistocene regionalism and territoriality, the advent of sedentism near the end of the Pleistocene, the origins of food production, and the initial ascendance of social complexity.

the human use of the land in (a) eastern Tanzania and (b) Tamilnadu is very different, as summarized in these idealized models Source Tamilnadu and eatern Tanzania: comparative regional geography and the Agricultural origins and dispersals

W T W Morgan

Although there are similarities in the physical environment, the human use of the land in (a) eastern Tanzania and (b) Tamilnadu is very different, as summarized in these idealized models Source: Morgan, W.T.W. 1988: Tamilnadu and eatern Tanzania: comparative regional geography and the UCL Press Sauer, C.O. (1952) Agricultural origins and dispersals New York: American Geographical Society Smith, B.D. (1995) The emergence of agriculture New York: W.H. Freeman Unger-Hamilton, R. (1989) The epi-palaeolithic southern Levant and the origins of agriculture, Current Anthropology 30, 88-103

Agricultural origins and dispersals The emergence of agriculture The epi-palaeolithic southern Levant and the origins of agriculture

C O B D Sauer

Sauer, C.O. (1952) Agricultural origins and dispersals New York: American Geographical Society Smith, B.D. (1995) The emergence of agriculture New York: W.H. Freeman Unger-Hamilton, R. (1989) The epi-palaeolithic southern Levant and the origins of agriculture, Current Anthropology 30, 88-103

The great human diasporas: the history of diversity and evolution Reading, Mass The invasion of New Zealand by people, plants and animals: the South Island New Jersey

L L Cavalli-Sforza

F Cavalli-Sforza

Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. & Cavalli-Sforza, F. (1995) The great human diasporas: the history of diversity and evolution Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Clark, A.H. (1949) The invasion of New Zealand by people, plants and animals: the South Island New Jersey: Rutgers University Press

The great human diasporas: the history of diversity and evolution Reading

L L Cavalli-Sforza

F Cavalli-Sforza

Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. & Cavalli-Sforza, F. (1995) The great human diasporas: the history of diversity and evolution Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley

The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia London: UCL Press McCorriston

D R Harris

Harris, D.R. (Ed.)(1996) The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia London: UCL Press McCorriston, J. & Hole, F. (1991) The ecology of seasonal stress and the origins of agriculture in the Near East, American Anthropologist 93, 46-69

The epi-palaeolithic southern Levant and the origins of agriculture

C O Sauer

Sauer, C.O. (1952) Agricultural origins and dispersals New York: American Geographical Society Smith, B.D. (1995) The emergence of agriculture New York: W.H. Freeman Unger-Hamilton, R. (1989) The epi-palaeolithic southern Levant and the origins of agriculture, Current Anthropology 30, 88-103

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the scientific field of archaeology, the term "settlement pattern" refers to the evidence within a given region of the physical remnants of communities and networks. That evidence is used to interpret the way interdependent local groups of people interacted in the past. People have lived and interacted together for a very long time, and settlement patterns have been identified dating back to as long as humans have been on our planet.

Key Takeaways: Settlement Patterns

Anthropological Underpinnings

Settlement pattern as a concept was developed by social geographers in the late 19th century. The term referred then to how people live across a given landscape, in particular, what resources (water, arable land, transportation networks) they chose to live by and how they connected with one another: and the term is still a current study in geography of all flavors.

According to American archaeologist Jeffrey Parsons, settlement patterns in anthropology began with the late 19th-century work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan who was interested in how modern Pueblo societies were organized. American anthropologist Julian Steward published his first work on aboriginal social organization in the American southwest in the 1930s: but the idea was first extensively used by archaeologists Phillip Phillips, James A. Ford and James B. Griffin in the Mississippi Valley of the United States during World War II, and by Gordon Willey in the Viru Valley of Peru in the first decades after the war.

What led to that was the implementation of a regional surface survey, also called pedestrian survey, archaeological studies not focused on a single site, but rather on an extensive area. Being able to systematically identify all the sites within a given region means archaeologists can look at not just how people lived at any one time, but rather how that pattern changed through time. Conducting regional survey means you can investigate the evolution of communities, and that's what archaeological settlement pattern studies do today.

Patterns Versus Systems

Archaeologists refer to both settlement pattern studies and settlement system studies, sometimes interchangeably. If there is a difference, and you could argue about that, it might be that pattern studies look at the observable distribution of sites, while system studies look at how the people living at those sites interacted: modern archaeology can't really do one with the other.

History of Settlement Pattern Studies

Settlement pattern studies were first conducted using regional survey, in which archaeologists systematically walked over hectares and hectares of land, typically within a given river valley. But the analysis only truly became feasible after remote sensing was developed, beginning with photographic methods such as those used by Pierre Paris at Oc Eo but now, of course, using satellite imagery and drones.

Modern settlement pattern studies combine with satellite imagery, background research, surface survey, sampling, testing, artifact analysis, radiocarbon, and other dating techniques. And, as you might imagine, after decades of research and advances in technology, one of the challenges of settlement patterns studies has a very modern ring to it: big data. Now that GPS units and artifact and environmental analysis are all intertwined, how to do you analyze the huge amounts of data that are collected?

By the end of the 1950s, regional studies had been performed in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Mesopotamia; but they have since expanded throughout the world.

New Technologies

Although systematic settlement patterns and landscape studies are practiced in many diverse environments, before modern imaging systems, archaeologists attempting to study heavily vegetated areas were not as successful as they might have been. A variety of means to penetrate the gloom have been identified, including the use of high definition aerial photography, subsurface testing, and, if acceptable, deliberately clearing the landscape of growth.

LiDAR (light detection and ranging), a technology used in archaeology since the turn of the 21st century, is a remote sensing technique that is conducted with lasers connected to a helicopter or drone. The lasers visually pierce the vegetative cover, mapping huge settlements and revealing previously unknown details that can be ground-truthed. Successful use of LiDAR technology has included mapping the landscapes of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Stonehenge world heritage site in England, and previously unknown Maya sites in Mesoamerica, all providing insight for regional studies of settlement patterns.

Selected Sources

Curley, Daniel, John Flynn, and Kevin Barton. "Bouncing Beams Reveal Hidden Archaeology." Archaeology Ireland 32.2 (2018): 24-29.

Feinman, Gary M. "Settlement and Landscape Archaeology." International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition). Ed. Wright, James D. Oxford: Elsevier, 2015. 654-58, doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.13041-7

Golden, Charles, et al. "Reanalyzing Environmental Lidar Data for Archaeology: Mesoamerican Applications and Implications." Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 9 (2016): 293-308, doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2016.07.029

Grosman, Leore. "Reaching the Point of No Return: The Computational Revolution in Archaeology." Annual Review of Anthropology 45.1 (2016): 129-45, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-095946

Hamilton, Marcus J., Briggs Buchanan, and Robert S. Walker. "Scaling the Size, Structure, and Dynamics of Residentially Mobile Hunter-Gatherer Camps." American Antiquity 83.4 (2018): 701-20, doi:10.1017/aaq.2018.39

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Settlement Patterns in Archaeology Are All About Living Together

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the scientific field of archaeology, the term "settlement pattern" refers to the evidence within a given region of the physical remnants of communities and networks. That evidence is used to interpret the way interdependent local groups of people interacted in the past.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 9:29•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Effects of Centrifugal & Centripetal Forces! AP Human Geography

# data[].attributes.body
theories of development unit 7 youtube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rostow's Model, World Systems Theory, and more Theories of Development! AP Human Geography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Challenges_to_sovereignty_article.docx - The idea of states as autonomous, independent entities is collapsing under the combined onslaught of monetary | Course Hero

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View Challenges_to_sovereignty_article.docx from HUMAND DEV 200 at American Public University. The idea of states as autonomous, independent entities is collapsing under the combined onslaught of

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Instructor: Ashley Dugger Show bio

Ashley has a JD degree and is an attorney. She has extensive experience as a prosecutor and legal writer, and she has taught and written various law courses.

Devolution occurs where an entity transfers power to another such as the federal government, relinquishing control to states. Explore examples of federalism, devolution, new federalism, the 'devolution revolution,' and subsequent programs. Updated: 01/14/2022

Federalism and Devolution

I have three kids. For most of their lives, I've done everything for them! I do their laundry, I provide their meals and I provide all of their transportation. But my kids are now teenagers. I'm still ultimately responsible for them having clean clothes, meals and rides, but I've started giving them some of the control and responsibility for these matters. What does this have to do with government? I'm using devolution!

Devolution is the transfer of certain powers from one entity to another. It's an effort to reduce federal government powers by transferring some responsibilities to the state governments. Through devolution, the states gain responsibility for matters that were previously handled at the federal level.

Devolution is related to federalism. Our Framers developed federalism when creating our United States Constitution. Remember that the Framers didn't want the federal government to have too much power over the people. Federalism, therefore, is a division of power between the federal government and the individual state governments.

Each government entity has responsibilities over the matters that are best addressed at that level of government. For example, the states handle most things themselves, but the federal government administers our national defense, interprets the Constitution and regulates interstate commerce.

Video

Quiz

Course

New Federalism

Specifically, devolution is based on the concept of new federalism. Our country moved toward new federalism in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly under the direction of Republican presidents Nixon and Reagan. New federalism allows the states to reclaim some power while recognizing the federal government as the highest governmental power. It's a response to the argument that the federal government grew too powerful during years of operation under other federalism theories.

Under new federalism, government powers are still divided between the federal government and the states. However, the states assume responsibility for federal programs.

Note that the federal government didn't outright give federal powers to the states. Instead, the federal government turned over some responsibility for federal programs so that those programs could be administered at a local level where administrators would be most familiar with the citizens' needs. Think of it as a partnership between the federal government and state governments.

Devolution Revolution

President Reagan campaigned for the 1980 presidency promising to curb the size and influence of the federal government. By the mid 1990s, the term devolution revolution was used to describe this particular era of politics where federal programs were downsized and state responsibilities were increased. The devolution revolution especially applied to various social programs, though Social Security and Medicare remain largely untouched.

Devolution increased in popularity because many politicians thought federal grants had been improperly used to impose the interests of the federal government on the individual states. Through devolution, the federal government instead provides large block grants, or blocks of money, to the states to be used for specific social programs. Unlike in previous years, the states have broad discretion to implement the programs as they best see fit. The federal government is still involved but mostly only monitors the progress and outcomes of the projects.

To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
Create your account

Register to view this lesson

Are you a student or a teacher?

Unlock Your Education

See for yourself why 30 million people use Study.com

Become a Study.com member and start learning now.

Become a Member

Already a member? Log In

Back

Resources created by teachers for teachers

Over 30,000 video lessons & teaching resources‐all in one place.

Video lessons

Quizzes & Worksheets

Classroom Integration

Lesson Plans

I would definitely recommend Study.com to my colleagues. It’s like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. I feel like it’s a lifeline.

Back

Create an account to start this course today

Used by over 30 million students worldwide

Create an account

Explore our library of over 84,000 lessons

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Devolution: Definition & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Devolution occurs where an entity transfers power to another such as the federal government, relinquishing control to states. Explore examples of...

# data[].attributes.body
big or small governemnt initatives affect tarrifs

# data[].attributes.body
6.7 infrastructure city and urban land use

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6.7 Infrastructure (Unit 6 Cities/Urban Land Use, Topic 7 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.body
we love urban renewal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4.7 Forms of Governance (Unit 4 Political Geography, Topic 7 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4.6 Internal Boundaries (Unit 4 Political Geography, Topic 6 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.body
5.1 introduction to agriculture video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Each society must have a political system in order to maintain recognized procedures for allocating valued resources. In large complex societies, many decisions must be made about the duties and responsibilities of citizens and also about the rights and privileges.

If the society is to be orderly, people must obey the rules that are made. The political institution determines and enforces the laws and punishes those who disobey them.

Even in stateless societies which had no developed formal central institutions were seen having some kind of decision-making and rule-making processes which were dominated by some members. As societies become wealthier and more complex, political systems develop and grow more powerful.

According to renowned political scientists, Gabriel Almond and James Coleman (1960), 'Political system is that system of interactions to be found in all independent societies which performs the functions of integration and adaptation by means of legitimate physical compulsion.'

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (1994) defines it as, 'a political system in any persistent pattern of human relationship that involves (to a significant extent) power, rule and authority.' It is a collectivity of political institutions (e.g., government), associations (e.g., political parties) and organizations performing roles based on a set of norms and goals (like maintaining internal order, regulating foreign relations, etc.). Sociologically, the term 'political system' refers to the social institution which relies on a recognized set of procedures for implementing and achieving the political goals of a community or society.

Almond and Coleman (1960) have described the following three main functions of a political system:

1. To maintain integration of society by determining norms.

2. To adapt and change elements of social, economic, religious systems necessary for achieving collective (political) goals.

3. To protect the integrity of the political system from outside threats.

They have grouped these functions into two categories:

(1) Input functions-political socialization, interest articulation, interest aggregation, and political communication; and

(2) output functions-rule making, rule application and rule adjudication.

Eisenstadt (1966) has classified the functions of a political system as:

(i) legislative,

(ii) decision-making, and

(iii) administrative.

According to Edward Shills, there are three main types of political systems.

These are discussed as under:

A system in which the state controls and regulates all phases of life considered essential for perpetuating its power and for carrying out programmes arbitrarily. It is the most extreme form of authoritarianism. Unlike democracies, where a variety of groups struggle for a voice in government, the government dictates the society's values, ideology, rules and form of government.

Societies having totalitarian system do not permit dissent. The centralized authority always dominates over the autonomy of individual or sub-groups within the society. Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union are often quoted as examples of totalitarian states.

Totalitarian states are ruled by one political party that organizes the citizens into a unified group. In practice, the state is represented by a politically powerful ruling class or elite that dominates all other interest groups.

Any form of government in which there is a 'rule by a few', for example, by members of a self-regulating elite having domination over a large society is known as an oligarchic political system. It is a system in which a small group (elites) rules and holds supreme power over a larger society.

In its broadest sense, democracy is a way of life in which an individual feels free to act within accepted boundaries of norms and also equal in respects of his/her rights. In the narrower sense, it is a form of government, a power structure in which people govern themselves.

People participate in the government through their representatives that they elect. In other words, people represent themselves and take their own decisions. It is an imagination of the replica of an equalitarian society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Political Systems: Meaning, Functions and Types of Political Systems

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ADVERTISEMENTS: Political Systems: Meaning, Functions and Types of Political Systems! Meaning: Each society must have a political system in order to maintain recognized procedures for allocating valued resources. In large complex societies, many decisions must be made about the duties and responsibilities of citizens and also about the rights and privileges.

# data[].attributes.body
political processes 4.2 in this video on youtube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Article

21

Human Geography, Anthropology, Geography, World History, Social Studies

Aziz Abu Sarah is a 2011 Emerging Explorer and peace activist dedicated to building bridges, not walls, between Israelis and Palestinians.

Encyclopedic Entry

172

Arts and Music, Economics, Geography, World History, Human Geography, Social Studies

Europe has a long history of human development and is considered the birthplace of Western Civilization.

Map

98

Geography, Geology, Earth Science, Physical Geography, Human Geography

MapMaker Kit. Download, print, and assemble maps of Europe in a variety of sizes. The mega map occupies a large wall, or can be used on the floor. It is made up of 112 pieces; download rows 1-8 for the full map. The tabletop size is made up of 12 pieces and is good for small group work.

Encyclopedic Entry leveled

289

Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Geography

A map is a symbolic representation of selected characteristics of a place, usually drawn on a flat surface

Encyclopedic Entry

171

Human Geography, Geography, Arts and Music, World History, Social Studies

Encyclopedic entry. South America’s human landscape is deeply influenced by indigenous and immigrant populations, and their connection to the physical environment.

Lesson

135

Geography, Physical Geography, English Language Arts, Human Geography

Students think about regions and borders by determining where they would place borders in an artificial continent, based on a set of physical and cultural features of the area.

Map

73

Download, print, and assemble maps of the physical United States in a variety of sizes. The mega map occupies a large wall, or can be used on the floor. It is made up of 49 pieces; download rows one to seven for the full map. The tabletop size is made up of nine pieces and is good for small group work.

Article

121

Human Geography, World History, Arts and Music, Geography, Social Studies

Asia is the largest of the world’s continents, and home to the world's oldest civilizations.

Encyclopedic Entry

46

Social Studies, Human Geography, Engineering, U.S. History, Geography

A capital is a city where a region's government is located

Activity

49

Physical Geography, English Language Arts, Geography, Human Geography

Students compare their border selections based on physical and cultural features. They discuss other factors that could impact where borders are established.

Article

46

Geography, World History, Social Studies, Human Geography, Physical Geography, Religion

Article. A historic, disputed border separates Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Encyclopedic Entry

167

Geography, World History, Social Studies, Human Geography, Economics

North America’s human landscape closely mirrors that of its physical environment: varied, rich, and constantly changing.

Encyclopedic Entry

60

Social Studies, Geography, Physical Geography, Human Geography, World History

Encyclopedic entry. A border is a real or artificial line that separates geographic areas. Borders are political boundaries.

Map

97

Social Studies, Geography

Map of the Union and the Confederacy

Encyclopedic Entry

164

Physical Geography, Earth Science, Geography, Human Geography

Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments.

Map

127

Physical Geography, Geography, Human Geography, Earth Science, Geology

Download, print, and assemble maps of the political world in a variety of sizes. The mega map occupies a large wall, or can be used on the floor. The map is made up of 136 pieces; download rows 1-8 for the full map of the world. The tabletop size is made up of eight pieces and is good for small group work.

Map

23

Geography, Arts and Music, Social Studies

Map of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Encyclopedic Entry leveled

61

Physical Geography, Human Geography, World History, Geography, Social Studies

A boundary is a real or imaginary line that separates two things. In geography, boundaries separate different regions of the Earth.

Article leveled

76

Arts and Music, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography

Strange Maps author Frank Jacobs shares his tips on how to be a critical map reader and get more information out of every map you see.

Encyclopedic Entry

91

Geology, Human Geography, Oceanography, Geography, Physical Geography, Biology, Earth Science

Antarctica is a unique continent in that it does not have a native population.

Lesson

88

Social Studies, World History, Human Geography, Geography

Students compare maps of European borders at three points in history: after World War I, after World War II, and the 2011 European Union (EU) countries. Students look for political borders that have changed and others that have remained the same, and compare those to what they know about cultural and physical geography in Europe and in their own state or local area.

Encyclopedic Entry

37

Geography, Civics, Social Studies, U.S. History, Human Geography, World History

Encyclopedic entry. Diplomacy is the art and science of maintaining peaceful relationships between nations, groups, or individuals. Often, diplomacy refers to representatives of different groups discussing such issues as conflict, trade, the environment, technology, or maintaining security.

Encyclopedic Entry

194

World History, Physical Geography, Geography, Social Studies, Human Geography, Earth Science, Geology

Africa is sometimes nicknamed the "Mother Continent" as it's the oldest inhabited continent on Earth.

Unit

186

English Language Arts, Geography, Physical Geography, Social Studies, Earth Science, Human Geography, World History

Use this unit to explore European physical and cultural landscapes with your middle school students. This series of teacher-tested lessons will have your students use maps to think about how borders intersect physical and human geographical features, and how those intersections can lead to cooperation and/or conflict.

Historic Article

15

U.S. History, Social Studies

On December 29, 1845, Texas became the 28th state in the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A political boundary is an imaginary line separating one political unit, such as a country or state, from another. Sometimes these align with a natural geographic feature like a river to form a border or barrier between nations. Occasionally, two countries may contest where a particular border is dr…

# data[].attributes.body
This meme is a bout fordism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Reed Hepler, Nate Sullivan, Lesley Chapel

Reed Hepler
Reed Hepler received an M.L.I.S. from IUPUI, with emphases in Digital Curation and Archives Management. He received a Bachelor’s in History from USU, with minors in Religious Studies and Anthropology. He also earned a Certificate in Museum Studies. He has worked in museums, libraries, archives, and historical sites for the past four years.
View bio

Instructor Nate Sullivan
Nate Sullivan holds a M.A. in History and a M.Ed. He is an adjunct history professor, middle school history teacher, and freelance writer.
View bio

Expert Contributor Lesley Chapel
Lesley has taught American and World History at the university level for the past seven years. She has a Master's degree in History.
View bio

Learn the political power definition and understand what is power in politics. Also, see different examples of political power and its manifestations. Updated: 01/16/2022

Table of Contents

What is Power in Politics?

Political Power Definition

Political Power and Territoriality

Lesson Summary

Show

What is Power in Politics?

What is political power? Power means different things in different contexts. For example, economic power is the ability of an individual, group, or country, to improve its financial situation. From a political perspective, power is the ability of politicians, leaders, and others to influence policy in a government, thereby controlling what decisions people and countries make. Political power is exercised through various power dynamics between political parties, social classes, and ethnic groups in all nations throughout the world.

Political power comes from the ability of politicians and others (lobbyists, business owners, etc.) to influence members of the public and other members of government to pass the policies they desire. The exercise of political power has several inherent risks, including:

Exercise of one's political power could influence the exercise of opposing power against their policies

Exercise of political power could cause resentment in the public

Exercise of political power could cause one to come under scrutiny

Various authors and leaders throughout history have given multiple definitions of political power and perspectives on how it can and should be exercised. In the perspective of John Locke, for example, the political power of government leaders is given to them by the consent of those whom they govern. Connected to this theory is the more recent concept of the Organic Theory of State, which argues that individual citizens of a political state are important elements of a natural organism.

Other authors have connected political power to other forms of power. In the writings of Karl Marx, political power in a capitalist society is exercised by those who are economically well off (factory owners) to oppress those who have no economic benefits (workers and laborers). In a communist state, this political power structure would be reversed. In a theocracy, political power is equated with religious authority.

Video

Quiz

Course

Political Power Definition

The political power definition is the ability of an individual or group to influence the creation of policies, usually in government. Each country has different representations of political power. For example, the political power of the government in the United States is divided into three branches: the Executive Branch (presidency), the Legislative Branch (Congress), and the Judiciary Branch (Supreme Court).

Some countries in history have had a more centralized form of political power. Completely centralized political power in one individual is called an autocracy. Examples of autocratic leaders include Adolf Hitler, who led the Third Reich, and Vladimir Lenin, who led Soviet Russia.

Examples of Political Power

Political power manifests itself in different ways in different countries. In many ways, the expression of political power is determined by the form of government in a country.

Example: Political Power and ''Brexit''

The political power of the public in the United Kingdom was demonstrated in 2016 when the people of the United Kingdom voted for the country to remove itself from the European Union. This was a movement known as ''Brexit.'' In January 2020, the United Kingdom officially left the Union, and was the first country to do so.

Color image. The decision of the United Kingdom to exit the European Union was decided by a popular referendum.

Example: Changing Political Power in China

Another example of political power shows how the foundations of that power can change. From Ancient China until the mid-twentieth century, the rulers of China established the legitimacy of their power through a principle called the Mandate of Heaven. They argued that as long as the state and nature were in harmony, Heaven supported the Emperor of China. When these were put into disarray, this was a sign of Heaven's disapproval with the Emperor. With the arrival of communism in the mid-twentieth century, the source of political power in China changed from a theological foundation to a populist, communist one. The Chinese Communist Party argued that since their policies were economically benefitting Chinese citizens, their government had a legitimate claim to political power.

Political power is significantly connected to the protection of a state's territory. As a result, countries take action to keep other states from certain regions. These actions are called territoriality. When members of a nation feel that their national interests or security are threatened, they can be persuaded to select policies which they otherwise would not approve of. In this way, individuals can amass significant political power.

To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
Create your account

Activities

FAQs

Prompts About Political Power and Territoriality:

Study Prompt:

Create a set of flash cards with the definitions of all of the bolded terms from the lesson (political power, Organic Theory of the State, heartland, rimland, territoriality).

Example: Political power controls how members of a society conduct themselves according to laws and regulations.

Essay Prompt 1:

Write an essay of at least two to three paragraphs that defines political power and explains how it can be both a positive and a negative thing.

Example: Political power helps hold society together.

Essay Prompt 2:

In approximately two to three paragraphs, write an essay that describes the Organic Theory of the State.

Example: This theory promotes the notion that the state is ever-changing.

Essay Prompt 3:

Write an essay of about three to four paragraphs that discusses the role of geography in political power. In other words, what benefits come with territorial power?

Example: Territorial power provides access to more natural resources.

Graphic Organizer Prompt:

Create a poster, chart, or some other type of graphic organizer that depicts the concepts of heartland and rimland.

Example: Since the American Midwest is often referred to as the "heartland" of the United States, you could draw wheat to illustrate it on a poster.

List Prompt:

Make a list of at least four ways that a country can demonstrate territoriality. You can refer to the lesson, but try to think of as many ways from memory as you can.

Example: Placing troops in an area.

What is another word for political power?

Another term for political power is political authority. It is the legitimacy of an individual, especially a politician, to influence the creation of policies. These in turn influence the actions of citizens.

What is the true meaning of power?

Power can be defined in different ways in different contexts. Political power is the ability of individuals to shape the creation of policy in government. This can affect the decisions of individuals and countries.

What does power mean in government?

In government, power means that one can influence the creation of policy. This can affect decisions in wartime and peace, during economic prosperity or in times of depression.

Register to view this lesson

Are you a student or a teacher?

Unlock Your Education

See for yourself why 30 million people use Study.com

Become a Study.com member and start learning now.

Become a Member

Already a member? Log In

Back

What teachers are saying about Study.com

Try it now

Already registered? Log in here for access

Create an account to start this course today

Used by over 30 million students worldwide

Create an account

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Political Power & Territoriality | Concept & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn the political power definition and understand what is power in politics. Also, see different examples of political power and its manifestations.

# data[].attributes.body
this is 3.4 type of diffusion in a video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
3.4 Types of Diffusion (Unit 3 Cultural Geography, Topic 3 of AP Human Geography)

If playback doesn't begin shortly, try restarting your device.

0:00

11:22

1:22 / 11:22•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3.4 Types of Diffusion (Unit 3 Cultural Geography, Topic 3 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.body
This is about how city planners can make a city unlivable for no reason

# data[].attributes.body
This video is about the population policies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2.7 Population Policies (Unit 2 Population & Migration: Topic 7 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ6xTpK_M6o

boundaries such as relic, superimposed, subsequent, antecedent, geometric, and consequent are important to our society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 0:53•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4.5 The Function of Political Boundaries (Unit 4 Political Geography, Topic 5 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.body
because we all depend on eachother

# data[].attributes.body
This is about how the mongols were an exception to a lot of things and then disappeared for pretty much no reason

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Also known as "political opportunity theory," political process theory offers an explanation of the conditions, mindset, and actions that make a social movement successful in achieving its goals. According to this theory, political opportunities for change must first be present before a movement can achieve its objectives. Following that, the movement ultimately attempts to make change through the existing political structure and processes.

Political process theory (PPT) is considered the core theory of social movements and how they mobilize (work to create change). It was developed by sociologists in the U.S. during the 1970s and 80s, in response to the Civil Rights, anti-war, and student movements of the 1960s. Sociologist Douglas McAdam, now a professor at Stanford University, is credited with first developing this theory via his study of the Black Civil Rights movement (see his book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, published in 1982).

Prior to the development of this theory, social scientists viewed members of social movements as irrational and crazed and framed them as deviants rather than political actors. Developed through careful research, political process theory disrupted that view and exposed its troubling elitist, racist, and patriarchal roots. Resource mobilization theory similarly offers an alternative view to this classical one.

Since McAdam published his book outlining the theory, revisions to it have been made by him and other sociologists, so today it differs from McAdam's original articulation. As sociologist Neal Caren describes in his entry on the theory in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, political process theory outlines five key components that determine the success or failure of a social movement: political opportunities, mobilizing structures, framing processes, protest cycles, and contentious repertoires.

1. Political opportunities are the most important aspect of PPT, because according to the theory, without them, success for a social movement is impossible. Political opportunities--or opportunities for intervention and change within the existing political system--exist when the system experiences vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities in the system can arise for a variety of reasons but hinge on a crisis of legitimacy wherein the populace no longer supports the social and economic conditions fostered or maintained by the system. Opportunities might be driven by the broadening of political enfranchisement to those previously excluded (like women and people of color, historically speaking), divisions among leaders, increasing diversity within political bodies and the electorate, and a loosening of repressive structures that previously kept people from demanding change.

2. Mobilizing structures refer to the already existing organizations (political or otherwise) that are present among the community that wants change. These organizations serve as mobilizing structures for a social movement by providing membership, leadership, and communication and social networks to the budding movement. Examples include churches, community and nonprofit organizations, and student groups and schools, to name a few.

3. Framing processes are carried out by leaders of an organization in order to allow the group or movement to clearly and persuasively describe the existing problems, articulate why change is necessary, what changes are desired, and how one can go about achieving them. Framing processes foster the ideological buy-in among movement members, members of the political establishment, and the public at large that is necessary for a social movement to seize political opportunities and make change. McAdam and colleagues describe framing as "conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action" (see Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framing [1996]).

4. Protest cycles are another important aspect of social movement success according to PPT. A protest cycle is a prolonged period of time when opposition to the political system and acts of protest are in a heightened state. Within this theoretical perspective, protests are important expressions of the views and demands of the mobilizing structures connected to the movement and are vehicles to express the ideological frames connected to the framing process. As such, protests serve to strengthen solidarity within the movement, to raise awareness among the general public about the issues targeted by the movement, and also serve to help recruit new members.

5. The fifth and final aspect of PPT is contentious repertoires, which refers to the set of means through which the movement makes its claims. These typically include strikes, demonstrations (protests), and petitions.

According to PPT, when all of these elements are present, it is possible that a social movement will be able to make changes within the existing political system that will reflect the desired outcome.

Key Figures

There are many sociologists who study social movements, but key figures who helped create and refine PPT include Charles Tilly, Peter Eisinger, Sidney Tarrow, David Snow, David Meyer, and Douglas McAdam.

Recommended Reading

To learn more about PPT see the following resources:

From Mobilization to Revolution (1978), by Charles Tilly.

"Political Process Theory," Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, by Neal Caren (2007).

Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, (1982) by Douglas McAdam.

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framing (1996), by Douglas McAdam and colleagues.

Updated by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Makes a Social Movement Successful?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Also known as "political opportunity theory," political process theory offers an explanation of the conditions, mindset, and actions that make a social movement successful in achieving its goals. According to this theory, political opportunities for change must first be present before a movement can achieve its objectives.

# data[].attributes.body
This 8-minute video is from youtube. It explains and shows the difference in maps

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
AP Human Geography Topic 1.1: Introductino to Maps

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpmDMgzCEhg

types of diffusion include expansion, stimulus, relocation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3.4 Types of Diffusion (Unit 3 Cultural Geography, Topic 3 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Introduction

Political geography as a systematic branch of human geography has a long, but not always distinguished, history. Like other branches of the discipline a precise definition is elusive with the nature of political geography, the issues explored, the approaches adopted, and the methods utilized displaying considerable breadth and variety. The nature of the subdiscipline has changed over time and its fortunes have waxed and waned for a variety of reasons. While being mindful of oversimplifying, it could be said that political geography is concerned with the interface between politics and geography. To be more precise, there is a focus on the spatial dimensions of power and with political phenomena and relationships at a range of spatial scales from the global down to the local. Another way of viewing this is to see it as revolving around the intersections of key geographical concerns of space, place, and territory on the one hand and issues of politics, power, and policy on the other. From this it follows that contemporary political geography encompasses a wide variety of themes. Rather than rigidly defining political geography it is perhaps best to think in terms of geographical approaches being brought to bear on a wide range of political issues. For some the study of spatial political units is central, for others there is an emphasis on major processes such as colonialism, while for still others it is concepts such as territory, state, or nation that are key. The diversity of issues and approaches means that it is more meaningful to talk of political geographies rather than a single unidimensional political geography.

Changes in themes, approaches, and methods have occurred in response to intellectual and methodological developments within the broader discipline and in academia more generally. However, they have also reflected broader social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental changes. The blurring of boundaries within the subdisciplines of human geography (and indeed the blurring of disciplinary boundaries more generally) means that some research that might be regarded as falling within the ambit of political geography is carried out by people who would not necessarily describe themselves as political geographers. Indeed they might not even regard themselves as geographers at all.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008044910400794X

The Way Forward

Political geography has emerged as one of the most vibrant and active areas of inquiry within the discipline of geography, and it is likely to remain so since the political-territorial upheavals of recent years show no signs of abating. Interest in political geography will likely be fueled by growing challenges to the role of the state - challenges that will further undermine the long-standing tendency throughout the social sciences to treat states simply as taken-for-granted spaces in which social processes play out. Rapid changes in the spatial organization of politics will also likely foster growing efforts to comprehend the nature and meaning of the changing political-territorial order. Studies in political geography will likely continue to be interdisciplinary in character, while underscoring the idea that political practices and outcomes cannot be divorced from the changing geographical spaces and contexts within which they are situated.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080970868720393

2 Political Geography in the Late Twentieth Century

Political geography did not remain marginal for long. An important edited compilation from the late 1960s (Kasperson and Minghi 1969) provided a useful framework for teaching and research, and geographers trained in quantitative urban and economic geography began to turn their attention to the role that politics plays in the distribution of services, people, and wealth. The latter development spawned work focused at local and regional scales. Kevin Cox's (1973) seminal book on the politics of urban services gave rise to an influential set of studies in 'welfare geography' (see Welfare State, Geography of and Locational Conflict (NIMBY)) that drew on diverse theories ranging from Marxism to public choice theory. In the process, political geography came into contact with emerging 'political economy' perspectives.

A somewhat different influence on political geography came from a group of urban and economic geographers with a quantitative bent who saw the potential for the quantitative analysis of election data. Extensive work on the spatial organization of elections, voting patterns, and the geography of representation made electoral geography a widely recognized sub-specialty within political geography beginning in the 1970s (Taylor and Johnston 1979). The methods and theories of electoral geography were not closely aligned with other work in the sub-discipline (Taylor 1985), but the developing field of electoral geography widened the scope of political geography and attracted interest among a new generation of geographers. At the same time, the different scales and issues on which votes are taken encouraged a broadening of political geography's prior preoccupation with the scale of the state.

By the early 1980s, political geography was clearly emerging from its formerly marginalized status. Having shed its positivist orientation, politics was back on the agenda of geography as a whole, and political geography could therefore no longer be dismissed as peripheral to the discipline. Moreover, new work on urban, regional, and electoral themes was attracting increased attention to political geography and connecting it to issues and concerns being taken up by other social sciences. Even more traditional themes were taking on new life, with expanding interest in shifting cold-war geopolitical relations and the emergence of new regimes of control in the world's oceans (see Glassner 1996). The founding of a new journal, Political Geography (originally entitled Political Geography Quarterly), in 1982; the establishment of major research and study groups in the International Geographical Union and various national geographic organizations; and the founding of a boundary research institute at the University of Durham signaled the growing importance of the sub-discipline.

At the heart of political geography's revivification was the effort to develop a more sophisticated theoretical foundation for the sub-discipline (Reynolds and Knight 1989). Impetus for the theoretical turn came from the combination of insights being offered by the new, theoretically informed literature on urban social conflict and a growing frustration with the lack of connection between research initiatives outside political geography and more traditional work in the sub-discipline. Explicit engagement with theory took two overlapping, but sometimes conflicting forms: a concern with developing a theory of the state and a concern with theorizing the nature of the state system.

The work of Gordon Clark and Michael Dear (1984) is particularly associated with the effort to theorize the state in political geography. They promoted consideration of a variety of theories of the state and themselves advanced an approach that drew on Marxist ideas on the role of the state in the maintenance and expansion of capitalism, but which argued that the state is also the product of the institutionalized political-economic patterns and arrangements that are produced through specific state structures and functional hierarchies. Their work helped to foster wide-ranging inquires into the spatial dimensions of state policy initiatives, as well as studies of the 'local state' and its relationship to the national state. The latter was also heavily influenced by the writings of David Harvey (e.g., Harvey 1985), who focused attention on how the capitalist accumulation process was linked to the political production of spatial inequalities within cities and sub-state regions.

Although those writing on the nature of the local and national state looked to the role of large-scale structural forces, their work focused on communities existing within states (see Reynolds and Knight 1989). Some political geographers saw this as seriously limiting, arguing that intrastate processes could only be understood with reference to the dynamics and norms of the international system of states. They also argued that political geography would have little to say about international relations if it did not confront the nature and meaning of the state system. The writings of Peter Taylor-particularly his important text, Political Geography: World-economy, Nation-state and Locality (Taylor 1985 and later editions)-were influential in advancing this argument. Drawing on the world-systems work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Taylor sought to situate analyses of the changing political geography of the modern world in the context of the territorial dynamics of the emerging capitalist world economy. He argued that the forms and functions of national and sub-national units are derived from the positions territorial states occupy in the global political-economic order. Taylor's particular use of world-systems approaches was not widely emulated, but his writings helped to put the very nature of the system of states at the center of the political geographic enterprise.

The new theoretical perspectives coming into political geography during the 1980s influenced both the types of issues being studied and how they were studied. The relationship between political geography and uneven development became a particularly significant focus of attention (see Smith 1984). Political geographers also turned their attention to processes of nation-building and substate nationalism, seeing these as predicated in significant ways on the nature of the state and the system of states (e.g., Johnston et al. 1988). Even some studies in electoral geography began to look at the relationship between spatial structures of power and electoral outcomes (Johnston et al. 1990).

The closing decade and a half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of new theoretical influences and a broadening of the scope of political geography (Agnew 1997). The growing influence first of structurationist, and then of post-structuralist, theories in the social sciences had clear impacts on political geography. The concern with the relationship between structure and agency that was part of the structurationist critique prompted political geographers to focus more attention on the ways in which political contexts are created through the interplay of large-scale forces and local practices. In his influential volume Place and Politics, John Agnew (1987) argued that political studies are generally based on the assumption that, in the modern world, local and regional identities are being replaced by national communities segmented by socio-economic differences, not by geographic sectionalism. Yet Agnew showed that this 'nationalization thesis' failed to account for the enduring impacts of local context on social and political behavior. In the process, he made a compelling case for taking the concept of place seriously in political geography (see also Johnston 1991).

The structurationist literature also brought with it growing interest in the spatial structures and arrangements that circumscribe social and political life. This offered a potential bridge between new currents of thought and longstanding efforts to analyze the development and meaning of the world political map (Gottmann 1973). An important element in building that bridge was Robert Sack's work on Human Territoriality (Sack 1986). Sack argued that a critical component of human social behavior was the effort to influence people and ideas through the control of specific geographical areas, and that a concern with ' human territoriality' could therefore provide important insights into social and political processes. Sack's work directly challenged the dominant tendency to treat political territories as a priori spatial givens, in the process opening an important theoretical window for political geographic work focused on the nature and meaning of specific political-territorial developments.

Work on the politics of place and on territoriality has developed in conjunction with themes from the post- structuralist literature to open new vistas for political geography. The very centrality of politics and political relations to post-structuralist thought has greatly abetted this process (Painter 1995). Indeed, at some level much of human geography as currently practiced is about politics, making it difficult to establish exactly what constitutes political geography per se. Yet, as Agnew (1997, p. 3) has argued, 'there is nevertheless still the need for an area of study of the more formalized and institutionalized arenas of power such as the spatiality of states, interstate geopolitics, the geographies of political and social movements, and territorial conflicts involving national and ethnic groups.' These are the matters that continue to be most closely associated with the sub-discipline of political geography, and they are not particularly confining. Indeed, the recent political geography literature addresses themes that range from the role of political geographic arrangements in the constitution of gendered identities to the implications of new telecommunications technologies for the territorial integrity of states.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767025699

Summary

Political geography is a diverse and ever-changing field of geographic enquiry. As such it defies easy definition. It has moved from being an account of the distribution and arrangement of power at different (though overlapping and interdependent) geographical scales to a consideration of how power diffuses across different scales through the workings of political networks, the drugs trade, terrorist organizations, environmental campaigns, and many other arenas. A key criticism of traditional political geography has been its state-centeredness. The uncritical assumption of the state as a "natural" political unit has been replaced by attempts at a deeper exploration of the nature of the state and its reasons for existing. Another criticism is linked to the focus on a traditional politics centered on the state and ignoring other political issues. The state is now seen as only one of a number of actors (albeit a very powerful and resilient one) to which attention needs to be directed. Another key change within political geography (and human geography more generally) has been the shift from the supposedly objective "view from nowhere" to the clear acceptance of the idea of positionality on the part of the academic. While many may accept the "situated knowledge" approach, it is not universal. Some academics continue to promulgate an academic objectivity that many others see as unsustainable. While this account has perhaps given the impression that political geography has evolved in a linear fashion, such is not the case. People like Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin wrote geographies heavily influenced by their anarchist beliefs and critical of big power politics as long ago as the late 19th Century. Political geography has been shaped by a variety of influences, including intellectual currents within the broader discipline and political events and practices beyond the academy. It continues to evolve and displays considerable vibrancy both in terms of the range of issues considered and the variety of approaches brought to bear.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081022955104883

Abstract

In political geography, the buffer zone concept covers a diversity of situations ranging in scale from demilitarized zones to parts of continents and in content from medieval marches to the global air travel space. Existing literature focuses on the scale of the buffer states, the conditions for the functioning of buffer states, their role in regional and global stability, and the dialectics of geographical environment versus internal forces. Buffer zones can also be analyzed from the perspective of wider systems, as large areas separating geopolitical, ideological, or civilizational blocs or as elements of an international frontier, partly managed by the institutions of the international community and including demilitarized zones, like the ones in Korea or in Cyprus. In spite of their strong linkage to traditional approaches of geopolitical thought, as a concept, buffer zones are closely related to efforts to renew political geography by reexamining its theoretical foundations. Finally, in a globalized world, there are also new forms of deterritorialized buffer zones appearing as a result of the recent trends toward deterritorialization of conflicts.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081022955102392

In political geography, the buffer zone concept covers a diversity of situations ranging in scale from demilitarized zones to parts of continents; and in content from medieval marches to the global air travel space. A large part of the existing literature focuses on the scale of the buffer states. The conditions for the functioning of buffer states, their role in regional and global stability, and the dialectics of geographical environment versus internal forces have been largely discussed during the twentieth century. Buffer zones can also be analyzed from the perspective of wider systems, as large areas separating geopolitical, ideological, or civilizational blocs or as elements of an international frontier, partly managed by the institutions of the international community and including demilitarized zones, like the ones in Korea or in Cyprus. In spite of their strong linkage to a traditional geopolitical thought, as a concept, buffer zones are closely related to the efforts to renew political geography by reexamining its theoretical foundations. Finally, in a globalized world, new forms of buffer zones make their appearance, while the recent trends toward deterritorialization of conflicts may introduce the issue of deterritorialized buffer zones.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104007616

Anarchism as a political philosophy and geography as a discipline were joined in the late nineteenth century through the work of Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin. Both geographers employed their study of the natural and social worlds to affirm the importance of nonhierarchical structures of cooperation and mutual aid. They opposed capitalism, colonialism, and all authoritarian relationships, utilizing spatial concepts to develop a theory of radical social ecology and decentralist forms of socio-spatial organization that support federations and new cooperative ways of living. Anarchism underscores the importance of creating 'free spaces' to foster active involvement and to allow experimentation with nonhierarchical ways of living and working. Anarchist geography seeks to reduce the scale of institutions to enable greater participation and free associations of people to achieve new forms of efficiency and exchange. Epistemologically, it challenges knowledge hierarchies and promotes the free flow of ideas. Anarchist geography also encourages active exploration and participatory planning of the environment; it challenges reduced access to public space and the imposition of restrictive classifications of space through design. Planning for diversity, flexibility, and change is encouraged. Social Anarchist ideas were most extensively applied during the social revolution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008044910400660X

Historical Specificity: Periodization and Territory

One way of political geography making a difference to our understanding on the state is to explore the spatiality of the state, state restructuring, and state intervention through the creation of 'spatiotemporal fixes'. This suggests that the state performs the role of securing the relative stabilization of society by endeavoring to manage the various economic and political contradictions within the state system. This is inherently spatial, and always temporary, as we shall see. The window into this perspective is normally a neo-Marxist approach, building on the above, interested in exploring state intervention and action through constructions of spaces (scales, levels, horizons, etc.) of intervention, the fixing of borders, the stabilization of places, and in short, attempts made to produce and reproduce a territorially coherent and functioning socioeconomic landscape. Using the work of Brenner on 'new state spaces', the remainder of this section outlines this and is interested in the historical specificity of the state in mainly North America and Western Europe in three distinct phases: 'encagement' (1890s-1930s), 'entrenchment' (1950s-early 1970s), and 'de-nationalization' (post-1970s onward). As noted in the 'Introduction', this challenges the national container-like assumptions of state and political geography.

Until the late nineteenth century, there was a distinct polarization between industrializing city-regions and predominately rural agricultural peripheries, which was reinforced at a global scale through colonialism and imperialist expansion. The global depression of the late 1890s and after, however, drove a search for a state-managed and organized capitalism. Despite the continued exploitation of 'peripheral' zones in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, an emerging 'encagement' of socioeconomic relations was taking place due to the increasing spatial convergence between the interests of capital and the state, which fueled the development of global urban hierarchies and increasingly territorial states. Geoeconomic interests began to dominate here and the continued expansion of capital growth and development drove the search for a spatial symmetry between a national economy, state bureaucracy, civil society, and national culture, all feeding each other. Infrastructure development across territorial space, industrial infrastructures, national economic planning, and an expanding state apparatus helped to secure this. Over a 40-year period, the state thus acquired a major role in the construction of numerous interlocking territorial infrastructures - public transportation, education and housing facilities, communication networks, utility supplies, and other aspects of the expanding urban fabric.

Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, and certainly after World War II, this model of statehood was consolidated further through modernization, nationalization, and rationalization to make space for a new wave of capitalist expansion, despite the onset of serious and lasting economic crises. Consequently, throughout the Fordist-Keynesian period, roughly from the 1950s to the early 1970s, the role of the territorial state as a geographical container of capital accumulation and social development intensified and solidified. Though propelled by the dynamism of large-scale manufacturing regions in Northeastern USA, the English Midlands, Northern France, Belgium, and the Ruhr district, the Fordist-Keynesian model of economic development was arranged into distinctly national space economies within a world system organized under the geopolitical and geoeconomic hegemony of the USA. Control of finance was key here, first through a stable international monetary regime and second an increasingly interventionist state regime capable of influencing the spatial location of capital and managing demand throughout the economy. Already during the 1930s states had begun to engage directly in attempts to devalue and revalue capital through subsidies, grants, loans, tax advantages, public investments, and state ownership of production facilities. This practice progressed and regional and local state institutions became transmission belts for interventionist central state politicis. Their goal was simultaneously to maximize growth and to redistribute its effects as evenly as possible on a national scale. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, a range of regional industrial policies were introduced to promote industrialization within each state's underdeveloped peripheries. This was supported by the expansion of the welfare state, increasing universal rights and social citizenship, and politics predominately related to achieving and raising social benefits. The state's role in territorializing capital and in securing a spatiotemporal fix for social relations, therefore, converged around the national scale. In this manner, the national scale came to operate as the most fundamental geographical framework for capitalist production and exchange, as the key institutional site of sociospatial polarization, and as the most central arena of sociopolitical contestation. This 'entrenchment' period can, therefore, be characterized as that of the Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS).

'De-nationalization' has had more profound implications on geography of world capitalism and the political geography of the state than the two preceding waves of spatiotemporal fixing. On suprastate levels, since the 1970s, new macro-geographies have been emerging and consolidating as Fordist-Keynesian national economies are being challenged and superseded by a configuration of the world economy dominated by the super regional blocs of Europe, North America, and East Asia. Shifts within the international division of labor, aided by technical change, have brought about intense economic restructuring, which has transformed some industrial heartlands into wastelands and provided new postindustrial opportunities for others. Accordingly, on substate levels, interspatial competition has intensified among cities and regions competing with one another to attract capital investment and secure state subsidies. Meanwhile, a global mosaic of world cities and industrialized urban regions has emerged as a crucial territorial infrastructure for the activities of transnational corporations. Consequently, the circulation of capital can no longer be adequately conceived with reference to autocentric national economies or the image of a world economy packaged into distinctive national-territorial spaces. A mosaic of postnational socioeconomic and sociospatial relations has been created.

In addition to these globally induced reconfigurations of the national scale, there has been a series of highly contested forms of reterritorialization involving the state and its interventions, restructuring impacts, and responses to this. Two overarching broad trends are worth mentioning and these have been defining research agendas in political geography and human geography more broadly in recent years.

First, scholars have highlighted a 'relativization of statehood'. In contrast to the era of Fordism-Keynesianism, described above, there is no privileged level around which the state can influence the unfolding of capitalism. The relativization of statehood thus implies: (1) an increasingly tangled hierarchy of overlapping, continually changing arrangements associated with multilevel interventions; and (2) the systematic lack of any dominant scale, or system of metagovernance, that encompasses or subsumes competing scales of political-economic organization. To understand this, the crisis of Fordist capitalism and the subsequent burst of globalization should be understood as a de-centering or 'hollowing out' of nationally scaled regulatory arrangements, as subnational and supranational scales of political-economic life have acquired a renewed, and in some cases unprecedented, significance through a variety of trial-and-error, often ad hoc, political initiatives, in especially economic development and regeneration. This often involves the shift from government to governance, as new arrangements for state management now involve an array of different socioeconomic partners and not just those in formalized state structures. The challenges of this are considered in the conclusion.

While the Keynesian welfare national states of the post-war era were intent to harmonize the equalization of wealth, population, and infrastructure across national territories, contemporary post-Keynesian state projects are promoting territorial competitiveness within certain strategic subnational sites such as cities, city-regions, and industrial districts, which in turn are to be positioned within supranational and global circuits of economic development. While certain aspects of this entrepreneurial reorientation of local and regional policy has occurred from below, as fiscally stressed localities and regional states have attempted proactively to attract new sources of investment through the actions of development agencies and other institutions, the 'new localism' and the 'new regionalism' must also be construed, to a significant degree, as national state projects. Indeed, provoked by hegemonic discourses of globalization and business civilization alongside a political rhetoric of fiscal prudence, national states have actively sought to reduce commitments to integrated welfare entitlements and redistributive urban and regional policies in favor of supply-side neoliberal initiatives intended to promote technological innovation, labor market flexibility, lean management, and endogenous growth.

Second, these state activities have been bringing with them 'authoritarian politics', that is, they can have deep consequences across cities and regions as inherited and hard-won forms of popular control over welfare state institutions and capitalist firms are being gradually eroded. Insofar as they have entailed a 'productivist' reordering of social policy and the increasing privileging of economic competitiveness, shifts to entrepreneurial governance have also contributed to a reduced commitment to the concerns of collective consumption for poorer sections of the working class. The reworking of state spatiality and territory in major urban regions has also frequently been linked to the construction of nonaccountable institutional arrangements, dominated by corporate elites and property owners who are largely insulated from democratic control and subordinated to narrow productivist goals, such as performance measures and target setting. Finally, the rescaling of political-economic governance has also entailed significant transformations of urban and regional space, as large-scale urban development projects and metropolitan institutional reforms are imposed from above, without extensive democratic deliberation or consultation. New landscapes of power have been created in which new forms of exclusion, subordination, and also resistance are inscribed into urban and regional space. One notable ingredient in this political endeavor has been 'workfare', which aims to secure a new relationship between the state and its subjects by requiring work or active labor-market activities in return for unemployment benefit and welfare assistance. Collectively, then, we are witnessing the arrival of Schumpeterian Workfare Post-National Regimes (SWPRs) to challenge what is left of the KWNS. Table 1 summarizes this transition.

Economic policies

Social policies

Scale

Means of compensating market failure

KWNS

Full employment, demand management, and provision of infrastructure to support mass production and consumption

Collective bargaining and state help generalize norms of mass consumption; expansion of welfare rights

Relative primacy of national scale in economic and social policymaking with local as well as central delivery

Market and state form a 'mixed economy'. State is expected to compensate for market failures

SWPR

Focuses on innovation and competitiveness in open economies, with increasing stress on supply-side reform

Subordinates social policy to an expanded notion of economic policy; downward pressure on 'social wage' and attack on welfare rights

Relativization of scale at expense of national scale. Competition to establish a new primary scale but continued role of national state(s)

Increased role of self-organizing governance to correct both market and state failures, but state gains greater role in the exercise of metagovernance

Based on Jessop, B. (2002). The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104008063

Cultural Geographies of the Sea

While contemporary studies of the political geography of the sea can draw upon a long history of political geographers studying maritime conflict, the study of marine issues is quite new in cultural geography. Of course, there always have been marine cultural geographies; seafaring and fishing communities invariably display distinct cultural formations that reflect and impact the surrounding marine environment. Historically, however, few geographers have devoted their attention to the cultures of fishing communities and even fewer have studied the cultures of societies engaged in uses of the deep sea (e.g., whalers, naval personnel, merchant mariners, oceanographic and fisheries researchers, or long-distance fishers).

As has occurred throughout cultural geography since the 1980s, much of the impetus for new cultural geographic studies of the sea has come from outside the discipline, especially from anthropology, history, literature, and cultural studies. This turn to the sea-and to understanding the sea as a space of culture-perhaps emerged first in the discipline of history. Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II demonstrated that the ocean, far from being an empty space between cultures, was in fact a space of interaction in which cultures (and natures) were formed and transformed. This perspective, which directly challenged prevailing ideas in cultural ecology (as well as in history and anthropology) about cultures being rooted in place, was soon taken up by other historians who started new ocean-basin-based organizations of history (most notably Atlantic history). In the 1990s, this work on the history of ocean regions began to be joined with work emerging from cultural studies (and, increasingly, cultural geography) on diasporas, hybrid identities, and transnationalism. Broadly, scholars associated with this school of thought stress the ways in which cultures are continually reproduced through movement and connection rather than through stasis in place. A key motivational book for integrating the ocean within this line of thinking was Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. Although Gilroy only indirectly considers the ocean as a material space of society, the book, which has been highly influential in cultural studies, suggests the power of oceanic metaphors, and, by association, oceanic spaces, in interpreting cultural formations.

To ground Gilroy's metaphors, some geographers have turned their attention to shipboard life. Shipboard life provides a unique environment for geographic research because it is simultaneously mobile and stable, it is both a workspace and a living space, it is both self-contained and open ended, and a ship is both an insular community and one that typically brings people of many backgrounds and nationalities together. Again, work in this area has been aided by advances outside the discipline, in particular by social historians who have researched the role of the 18th- and 19th Century seamen, pirates, and whalers in constructing modern norms and disciplines of nation, class, gender, sexuality, and labor.

Within geography, the interdisciplinary Oceans Connect project, based at Duke University in the late 1990s, sought to reinfuse regional geography with an ocean-basin-based perspective that privileged interaction and transformation over insularity and stasis. These ocean-basin-based reconceptualizations of the region may be most effective when undertaken together with small-scale, place-based studies. The foregrounding of the ocean as a space of connection, after all, should not lead one to forget that, for many littoral dwellers, the ocean is perceived as fundamentally local: as a set of distinct, known sites whose integration into everyday life is conditioned by place-based traditions. However, by foregrounding the ocean as a space of society and culture, one can come to appreciate that even these highly localized systems exist within contexts of connection and interaction. Thus, for instance, scholars of islands (which were long considered by biologists and anthropologists as paradigmatic laboratories of homogeneity and isolation) increasingly use the ocean to reposition islands as nodes amidst channels of movement.

In other words, the ocean is being turned to by two groups of cultural geographers. Some have turned to the ocean to expand their understanding of the spaces of local life-worlds. Others, attracted by the ocean's character as a literal and metaphorical space of movement, have turned to the ocean in an attempt to decenter fixed ideas of nation, state, territory, and culture. These two perspectives, however, are by no means incompatible, and much future work in marine cultural geography will likely lie at their intersection.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081022955107486

Electoral geography is a subfield of political geography, focusing on the interaction of space, place, and electoral processes. The field examines the impact of geographical context on voters' decisions, parties' strategies, and on the operation of electoral systems and forms an interface between human geography and political science. The academic origins of electoral geography are traced: pioneers in political science and geography are identified, and their legacy is assessed. This is followed by a discussion of methodological issues in the field: theoretically driven quantitative analyses of large data sets predominate in the field, but there are some differences between North American and British electoral geographers in the data used. Overviews of current thinking on the electoral impacts of several contextual factors are provided: local social factors; neighborhood networks and conversations between voters; local economic conditions and valence politics; and the geography of political campaigning. Consideration is also given to the ways in which geography influences the operation of electoral systems via the translation of votes into seats. As a subfield, electoral geography has traditionally had a strong national focus. Questions of scale are therefore discussed, with particular emphasis on the potential for comparative international research.

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104007707

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Political geography as a systematic branch of human geography has a long, but not always distinguished, history. Like other branches of the discipline a precise definition is elusive with the nature of political geography, the issues explored, the approaches adopted, and the methods utilized displaying considerable breadth and variety.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfZ-hScCQI8

thomas mathus theorized that the population would always outgrow our supplies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 0:49•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2.6 Malthusian Theory (Unit 2: Population & Migration, Topic 6 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
0:00 / 14:47•Watch full video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3.1 Introduction to Culture (Unit 3 Cultural Geography, Topic 1 of AP Human Geography)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3.2 Cultural Landscapes (Unit 3 Cultural Geography, Topic 2 of AP Human Geography)