LOCAL-GLOBAL

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY:
SPACE, PLACE, AND COMMUNITY

DR. LAWRENCE D. BERG, PROFESSOR OF CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY

 INTRODUCTION
• Three ideas are key to Human Geography’s understanding of itself as a distinctive
intellectual endeavour:
• First, in the emphasis on the distinctive characters of particular places, they
highlight the idea of the local.
• Second, bound up with a desire to broaden horizons and foster a greater
‘world awareness’ is the idea of the global.
• And third, central to this interest in both the local and global is an emphasis
on difference (between places and people).
• This lecture examines the relations between these three ideas: the local, the
global and difference.
• The lecture starts by briefly outlining how and why ideas of the local and the global
have been so important to Human Geography.
• I then set out three takes on local–global relations:
• Mosaic
• system
• network.

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THE EMPIRICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PLACE

• In his thoughtful book The Betweeness of Place, Nick Entrikin (1991) argued that
geographers have been interested in the local for three interrelated reasons.
• First, they have emphasized the actually existing variations in economy, society and
culture between places; or what Entrikin terms the ‘empirical significance of place’.
• Despite the homogenizing ambitions attributed to the likes of McDonald’s,
everywhere is not the same. Landscapes vary. Life chances are materially
affected by the lottery of location. Whether you happen to be born in Lagos or
London or Los Angeles, or indeed in Compton or Beverly Hills, has an impact on
the kind, and even length, of life you can expect.
• Location is not just something we encounter and deal with. It is part of us. Where
we are is part of who we are. Most obviously, this is the case through the spatial
partitioning of the world into nationalities, imaginative constructions that are part
of our identities, so powerful as to get people to kill and die in their name.
• So, places and the differences between them can be seen to exist and have real
effects.

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THE NORMATIVE SIGNIFICANCE TO PLACE

• the local also matters in a second way. Spatial variations do not only exist. They are
valued, or seen as a good thing, not least by Human Geographers. There is, then, what
Entrikin calls a ‘normative significance to place’.
• Sometimes this is expressed as a celebration of difference: whether out of a
suspicion of the power of global, homogenizing forces (‘the media’, ‘American
multinationals’, and so on); or out of a pleasure gleaned from experiencing
variety and the unexpected.
• Sometimes the local is cherished for its communal forms of social organization,
for embodying an ideal of small and democratic organizations (for a critical and
suggestive review see Young, 1990).
• And sometimes this social idealization goes hand in hand with an environmental
utopia of self-supporting, environmentally sustainable livelihoods (Schumacher,
1973), or at least an appeal to the local as a way of living more lightly on the
planet, as when calls are made to reduce ‘food miles’ by ‘re-localizing’ supply
networks and supporting local producers.
• But whether culturally, socially or environmentally framed, in all such arguments the
local does not just matter. It matters because it is in some way ‘good’

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THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PLACE

• The third importance attached to the local within Human Geography,

according to Entrikin, involves a concern with the impact of the local on the
kinds of understanding or knowledges that geographers themselves produce;
what he calls the ‘epistemological significance of place’.
• In part this involves a scepticism towards general theories that claim
equal applicability everywhere.
• It also means a sensitivity to where knowledges come from (to their
‘situatedness’).
• Geographers don’t only know about localities, they produce local
knowledges

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FOUR GLOBAL VISIONS
• Not just interested in the local: keen interest in the global too:
a) exploration; b) development; c) environment; d) time-space compression

6
Source: Painter, 2014, n.p.
GLOBAL VISION I: EXPLORATION

• First, we can identify a geographical concern

with exploration, driven by a desire to ‘know the
world’.
• Exploration was central to geography’s early history
– such that geography’s development as a science,
from the sixteenth century onwards, went hand in
glove with European explorations to the farthest
corners of the earth (Driver, 2001; Livingstone,
1992; Stoddart, 1986).
• Today, exploration continues to excite popular
cultures of geography, whether in forms of travel
that offer experiences ‘off the beaten track’ (for
more, see Chapter 53) or the mass-
circulation National Geographic’s promotional claim
to give American readers a ‘window to the world of
exotic peoples and places’ (cited in Lutz and Collins, Captain Vancouver’s 1798 map of San Juan
1993: xi). Gulf
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vancouver1798map-SanJuan-
Gulf.png

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GLOBAL VISION II: DEVELOPMENT
Second, there is an emphasis on development, with its hope of ‘improving the world’.
Here, a world vision matters not only in order to rectify ignorance of the world’s diversity,
but also to explain and act against global inequalities between North and South.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index
GLOBAL VISION III: ENVIRONMENTALISM
hird, there is global environmentalism, with its concern for ‘saving the world’ against planetary
threats such as global warming or ozone depletion. Here, thinking globally is essential not only to
recognize the scale of these problems but also to understand the true environmental impacts of
our local actions (so, when I set the thermostat on my central heating I need to be aware of the
impact of my domestic energy use on CO2 emissions).

“Earthrise”, 1972, William Anders (Apollo 8 astronaut) 9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise#/media/File:NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg
GLOBAL VISION IV: TIME-SPACE COMPRESSION

Finally, there is a concern with

global compression or the ‘shrinking of the world’
(see Harvey, 1989: 240–307). The emphasis here
is on the increasingly dense interconnections
between people and places on other sides of the
world from each other, whether through
telecommunications, global flows of money or
migrations and other forms of travel.
‘Globalization’ has become the most prevalent
term to describe such compression (for a very
good overview, see Murray, 2006). In a globalized
world our local lives are led on a global scale. The
food we eat, the clothes we wear, the television
programmes we watch, the cars we drive or
bicycles we ride, all these materials of our
mundane, everyday lives come to us through
enormously complex and globally extensive
production and retail systems.
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LOCAL-GLOBAL NEXUS

Human Geography is characterized by a concern with both the local and the global. At
times, these can be understood as competing scales of interest: as when calls are made
for geographers to escape local trivia and address the really important global issues; or,
conversely, when global accounts are criticized for not paying due attention to local
differences. But, the local and the global can also be seen as two sides of the same coin.
Travellers set out across the world to find new ‘locals’ to encounter and report back on.
Environmentalists and multinational corporations both sloganize about ‘thinking globally
and acting locally’. So, how we understand and construct the global shapes our
understanding of the local, and vice versa. Lets think of these relationships in three
schematic accounts of local–global relations: the world as mosaic, the world as system,
and the world as network

Source:
Painter, 2014, 11
n.p.
MOSAIC

• One very popular way of thinking about Human Geographies is in terms of a mosaic.
• Here, the world is conceived as a collection of local peoples and places, each one
being a piece in a broader global pattern.
• This way of seeing the world can be drawn out at a number of different scales, from
neighbourhoods right up to whole continents. It is perhaps most obvious at the level of
the nation-state.
• The whole idea of nationalities depends upon constructing distinctive pieces of an
international mosaic; establishing borders and territories; and distinguishing between
this country and that country, our people and those foreigners. Political maps of the
world present this mosaic cartographically, national pieces set next to each other and
the ‘open’ spaces of the sea.
• Mosaics are made too at the smaller scales of the city, in mappings of a patchwork of
local areas, each characterized by different economies, residents and built
environments.
• Think, for example, about how estate agents and others seeking value in the property
market such as retail location analysts or gentrifiers, map out cities into areas,
neighbourhoods and streets with supposedly distinctively different characters.

12
Source: Castanet, February 10, 2019: 13
https://www.castanet.net/realestate/?re_mls=&re_ptype=0&re_location=4&re_neighborhood4=&other_city=&minprice=200000&maxprice=2000000&numbeds=0-0&numbaths=0-
0&submit=
CONSEQUENCES OF ‘MOSAIC’ THINKING

Three features are especially important.

• First, the mosaic puts an emphasis on boundaries and borders. Geographical
difference is seen in terms of distinct areas that can have lines drawn around them.
• Second, these areas are understood in terms of their unique characters, personalities
or traditions. That is, each piece of the mosaic is seen as having distinctive ‘contents’,
whether that be its people, culture, economic activities and/or landscape, which cohere
into some sort of unified geographical identity.
• Third, this means that any intrusions into a distinctive area tend to be seen as a threat
to its unique character.
• For an example one could think of worries about how the global predominance of
American popular culture, from fast food to TV programmes, is destroying local
cultures and producing one Americanized global monoculture, where everybody,
wherever they are, eats Big Macs, drinks Coca-Cola and watches American
soaps (see Peet, 1989).
• Or one could think about claims that human migrations pose problems for the
cultural integrity of receiving areas, overwhelming or in some way undermining
indigenous culture unless immigrants are properly assimilated

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EVIDENTIAL PROBLEMS WITH MOSAIC THINKING

• The world’s differences do not fit into the frame of a geographical mosaic, no
matter how many scales it is imagined at. The contents of any one area are never
uniformly the same. To claim they are is to produce what statisticians call an
‘ecological fallacy’, applying the general, average qualities of an area to all its
inhabitants.
• One reason why difference refuses to be contained within the pieces of a mosaic
is that the world does not stay still. If we think about the continental
‘metageography’ of people, then we know that Europeans haven’t stayed in
Europe, Africans haven’t stayed in Africa, and so on. We know that our economies
too are interlinked, with fluid forms of capital able to migrate around the world. We
cannot simply draw boundaries around local or national or continental economies.
The world is not a fixed array of pieces; much of it is mobile, on the move.
• In analyzing the impacts of such mobilities, we cannot assume that the opening
up of local places to global forces necessarily results in the destruction of
difference. Instead, global forms are often ‘indigenized’ or ‘localized’ in different
ways in different places.

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AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND KIWIBURGER

16
Source: McDonald’s New Zealand (https://mcdonalds.co.nz/menu/kiwiburger-2018)
 (REACTIONARY) POLITICS OF MOSAIC THINKING
• The problems with the figure of the mosaic are not only factual – they also stem from its
political impulses and ramifications.
• To be fair, there are many positive elements to the notion of the geographical mosaic. Often
underlying it is a desire both to recognize and respect differences; to appreciate, in both senses
of the word, that everyone is not the same as you are, and that everywhere is not the same as
here.
• But it is not enough just to appreciate difference. We have to think about how the idea of
difference is being constructed and used.
• In the case of the mosaic, all too often either the impulse or the effect is defensive and
exclusionary. Difference is locked into a geography of territories and borders. It is framed in
terms of insiders and outsiders. The mosaic also depends on stereotyping. It understands and
recognizes differences by simplifying them and their location. This way of seeing the world is
not so much a description of it as a powerful way of claiming and attributing difference in spatial
terms. It projects differences on to distant people and places in order to create some sense of
unity ‘at home’; ‘they’ and ‘there’ are different to ‘us’ and ‘here’.
• It can legitimate claims for a place to belong to some and not to others. It entangles geography
with a politics of ‘purification’, in which sameness should be here and difference should be
there.
• Donald Trump’s ‘Border Wall’ would be an example of practices that follow the mosaic and its
logic of each different thing in its own different place to the most brutal conclusions.
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GLOBAL MIGRATION

Source: http://metrocosm.com/global-migration-map.html 18
THE POWER OF PERCEPTION

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Source: Dag Tjaden, J. 2018. 10 of the coolest visualizations of migration data: 1. The Power of Perception.
https://migrationdataportal.org/blog/10-coolest-visualizations-migration-data. Accessed 12 Feb. 2019
SUMMARY I

• A very common way of imagining local–global relations is to envision a

world of many different local places and peoples, each being a piece in a
wider Human Geographic global mosaic.
• This constructs the local as a bounded area, made distinctive through
the character of life and land within it. It also tends to construct global-
scale processes as destructive to that local diversity.
• There are factual problems with this way of framing local–global
relations. For example, local differences are not inevitably destroyed by
global level processes; in fact they are often produced through them.
• There are also political dangers attached to it, in particular an impulse
towards defensiveness and the exclusion of non-locals.
• The mosaic is only one way of imagining local–global relations, so rather
than seeing it as a simple portrait of geographical reality the reasons for,
and effects of, its use need to be analyzed.

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SYSTEM

• An alternative way of thinking about local–global relations is to see local

differences as produced by a global system.
• That is, the differences between places are not seen as a consequence
of their internal qualities but as a result of their location within the wider
world.
• The mosaic of geographical difference is not innate but made
systemically.
• We need to understand the processes and powers that make it.
• We might, for example, argue that the very idea of a geographical
mosaic is a framework that makes difference, forming the world through
particular templates.
• However, perhaps the best examples of this argument come from within
development studies and through attempts to understand the extreme
differences that characterize our world.

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INTERNAL PROBLEMS?
• One (dominant) way of thinking about the differences and inequalities in wealth
and life chances between different parts of the world would be to identify internal
characteristics that explain them.
• Europe and North America are so comparatively wealthy because of the
economic innovation they have shown since the time of the Industrial
Revolution or due to longer-term advantages conferred by temperate
climates and the early adoption of agriculture.
• The Global South is comparatively so poor because of its lack of natural
resources, an inhospitable climate or some perceived deficiencies in its
culture.
• What this kind of explanation ignores, though, is the fact that Europe and the
Philippines are not just separate places, they are places with long histories of
interconnection through world political, economic and cultural systems.
• Europe and the Global South are so different because of these relationships with
each other rather than because of their internal qualities.
• To put it bluntly, maybe we need to think less about Europe and the Global South
separately, and rather more about whether Europe is rich precisely because the
Global South is poor. 22
WORLD-SYSTEM THEORY

• Central to such efforts of understanding how and why differences are

produced at the global scale has been work focused on the world-
system.
• Here the world is treated as a single economic and social entity.
• At the heart of its operations is the capitalist world economy.
• James Blaut put it this way, in arguing against the idea of a special
European character that has led to its relative economic success:

“Capitalism arose as a world-scale process: as a world system.

Capitalism became concentrated in Europe because colonialism
gave Europeans the power both to develop their own society and to
prevent development from occurring elsewhere. It is this dynamic of
development and underdevelopment which mainly explains the
modern world.”

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 24
Source: Moyer, K. 2016. “Periphery Role in the World Systems Theory”, https://medium.com/@kendallgrace15/periphery-role-in-the-
world-systems-theory-fa5d291cac55
 GLOBAL CORE-PERIPHERY

Source: Wikicommons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory#/media/File:World_trade_map.PNG

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SUMMARY II

• Differences between places are not just the result of their

‘internal’ characteristics. They are produced by systems of global
relations between places.

• Human Geography should therefore do more than document

diversity. It should investigate the processes of
differentiation through which diversity and inequality are
produced.

• These processes of differentiation operate at both global and

local scales.

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NETWORKS

• So far we have seen two differing ways to think about the relations between the
global and local.
• In the model of the mosaic, the global is portrayed as a collection of smaller
locals.
• In the model of the system, the global is portrayed as a set of relations through
which local differences are produced, and the emphasis is less on collection and
comparison than on connection.
• Many geographers take take this idea of connection further:

• They suggest that we can see both the local and the global as made up of
sets of connections and disconnections that we can call ‘networks’.
• In consequence, we may need to view the local and the global not as
different scales (small and large) but as two ways of approaching these
networks
• The local is global and the global is local

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A GLOBAL SENSE OF PLACE

• Geographer Doreen Massey coined the phrase ‘a global sense of place’

(Massey, 1991, 1994).
• localities gain their different, specific characters through distinctive
historical and contemporary links to other places.
• Produces a more ‘progressive’ politics of place.
• Places are not ‘things’ (such as pieces in a geographical mosaic); they are ‘ever-
shifting constellations of trajectories’ (Massey, 2005: 151).
• Places are less containers of different and distinctive contents than they are ‘open
and internally multiple’; less fixed, more of an ‘event’, a ‘coming together of the
previously unrelated’ (Massey, 2005: 141, 138).
• local places gain their different characters through their distinctive patterns of
associations with other places.
• the global is less some neat, all-embracing system with a single logic, than a
mass of globally extensive yet locally routed practices and technologies of
connection. Not only do we need to globalize the local, but we also need to
localize the global, understanding the global as something other than a single
entity or system
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 Global Sense of Place:
Shopkeepers countries of Origin, Walworth Road, London

Source: Hall, Suzane M. 2010. Picturing Difference: Juxtaposition, collage and layering of a multi-ethnic street. 29

Anthropology Matters, 12 (1): 1-17.

FOLLOW THE THING: PAPAYA*

*Ian Cook, et al. 2004. “Follow the Thing: Papaya. Antipode

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SUMMARY III

• Local places get their distinctive characters from their past and present
links to the rest of the world. In consequence, we need a ‘global sense
of the local’.

• Global networks – with their flows of information, ideas, money, people

and things – have locally routed geographies. In consequence, we need
‘localized senses of the global’.

• Wider literatures on ‘mobilities’ and ‘Actor-Network Theory’ have

informed recent attempts to map out ‘networky’ geographies that both
‘localize the global’ and ‘redistribute the local’.

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