Spaces of Capital

Towards a Critical Geography

David Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781136759154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

David Harvey is the most influential geographer of our era, possessing a reputation that extends across the social sciences and humanities. Spaces of Capital, a collection of seminal articles and new essays spanning three decades, demonstrates why his work has had-and continues to have-such a major impact. The book gathers together some of Harvey's

Part 1

Geographical Knowledges/Political Power

Chapter 2

What Kind of Geography for what Kind of Public Policy?

First published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1974.

Can geographers contribute successfully, meaningfully and effectively to the formation of public policy?

General Pinochet is a geographer by training, and by all accounts he is successfully putting geography into public policy. As President of the military Junta that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile on 11 September 1973, General Pinochet does not approve of ‘subversive’ academic disciplines such as sociology, politics and even philosophy. He has asked that ‘lessons in patriotism’ be taught in all Chilean schools and universities and he is known to look with great favor upon the teaching of geography – such a subject is, he says, ideally suited to instruct the Chilean people in the virtues of patriotism and to convey to the people a sense of their true historic destiny. Since the military have taken full command of the universities and frequently supervise instruction in the schools, it appears that geography will become a very significant discipline in the Chilean educational system.

General Pinochet is also actively changing the human geography of Chile. An example is here in order. The healthcare system of Chile has, for some time, comprised three distinct components: the rich paid for services on a ‘free-market’ basis; the middle classes made use of hospital-based medicine financed by private insurance schemes; while the lower classes and poor (some 60 per cent of the population) received free medical care in community-based health centers paid for out of a National Health Service (Navarro 1974). Under Allende, resources were switched from the first two sectors into the community health services which had previously been poorly financed and largely ignored. The geography of the healthcare system began to be transformed from a centralized, provider-controlled, hospital-centred system catering exclusively to the middle and upper classes, to a decentralized, community-controlled, free healthcare system primarily catering to the needs of the lower classes and the poor. This transformation did not occur without resistance – the providers of hospital-based medicine organized strikes to preserve the old social geography of healthcare against the emergence of the new. But during the Allende years the community health centers grew and flourished. Also, community control through the creation of community health councils had a profound political impact and many aspects of life began to be organized around the community health centers. The emphasis also shifted from curative medicine (with all of its glamour and expensive paraphernalia) to preventive medicine which sought to treat medica) care as something integral to a wide range of environmental issues (water supply, sewage disposal, and the like). The human geography of social contact, political power and distribution changed as hitherto never before, as the lower classes and poor people began to realize the potential for controlling social conditions of their own existence.

But military power and General Pinochet have changed all that. The community health councils have been disbanded and many of those who participated in them have been imprisoned or executed. The community health centers have been severely curtailed in their operation. The administration of the healthcare system has been given back to the providers of medicine; and the system is reverting to a centralized, hospital-based system catering to the upper and middle classes. Curative medicine is once more the order of the day and open-heart surgery for the few replaces sanitation for the many as the primary goal of medical care. The old geography has been reasserted and the new has been effectively dismantled. Thus has the intervention of the geographer, General Pinochet, become a determining force in the human geography of the healthcare system of Chile.

Chile may seem a long way from Britain. My purpose in quoting this example is not, however, to seek parallels with Britain (although it is disconcerting to note that the government of a country which so actively resisted the advance of fascism from 1939–45 has so hastily extended the hand of friendship to General Pinochet, and that the reorganization of the British National Health Service in the summer of 1973 eliminated all trace of community control and placed the provision of healthcare firmly in the hands of the providers who favor a centralized, hospital-based, healthcare delivery system). I am concerned, rather, to use this example of the successful injection of geography into public policy to pose two very basic questions that must be asked prior to any kind of commitment of geography to public policy: ‘What kind of geography?’ and ‘Into what kind of public policy?’

These are profoundly difficult questions to answer. It is perhaps useful to begin by asking why we might feel the urge to put any kind of geography into any kind of public policy in the first place. If we reflect upon our motivations for a moment, it seems that this urge arises out of an odd blend of personal ambition, disciplinary imperialism, social necessity and moral obligation. Some of us may be governed (or think we are governed) more by one factor than another, but none of us, surely, can claim total immunity from any of these motivations.

Personal ambition is very significant for us all since we are raised in an economic and social system that is inherently both individualistic and competitive. Since much of the power in society (both economic and political) resides in the public domain, it is natural for academics to be drawn to the locus of that power. Vaunting personal ambition is probably the most significant of all motivating factors in explaining individual behavior. But it does not explain too well the behavior of the geographer as distinct from any other academic and it is to be doubted if an academic possessed of enormous personal ambition would choose to start from what, in Britain at least, must surely be a disadvantageous base in the pecking order of academic disciplines.

The reputation and status of the discipline is, in a way, personal ambition mediated by group consciousness. Disciplines inevitably serve to socialize individuals to the point where they come to locate their identity in terms of ‘geography’, ‘economics’, ‘biology’, etc. In reply to the question ‘who are you?’ we frequently reply, ‘I am a geographer (economist, biologist, etc)’. Disciplines are important for they help us to understand our role and to feel secure. But geography is one amongst many disciplines which compete for status and prestige in the public eye. Disciplines also compete for public funds. The security of these who identify themselves as ‘geographers’ is, as a consequence, wrapped up in the position of geography with respect to other disciplines. And so we come to think, ‘what is good for geography is good for me’ and to recognize that ‘a threat to geography is a threat to me’. By promoting geography we promote ourselves and we defend ourselves by defending geography.

Personal ambition and disciplinary imperialism explain a great deal when it comes to understanding individual and professional behaviors. But as explanations they are, I believe, far too simplistic. In what follows, therefore, I shall largely ignore the question of personal ambition and concentrate on the deeper problems of social necessity (mediated by disciplinary imperialism) and moral obligation.

Geography and Social Necessity

The evolution of geography as a discipline has to be understood against a background of changing social necessities. Since these necessities vary somewhat from society to society I shall confine attention, for the most part, to the recent history of geography in Britain.

In Britain an ‘epistemological break’ occurred in geographical thinking and activity somewhere around 1945. This break was perhaps best symbolized, first by Professor Wooldridge’s influential invocation of the slogan ‘the eyes of the fool are on the ends of the earth’, and, second, by the foundation of the Institute of British Geographers as a breakaway organization from the Royal Geographical Society. Prior to the Second World War, geography had been more of a non-academic, practical activity than a strong academic discipline. It was oriented, primarily through the activities of the Royal Geographical Society, to what can best be called ‘the technics and mechanics of the management of Empire’. The university-based component of geography was relatively weak, while much of what there was (the tie to the Colonial Survey being a good example) related to the concern for Empire. This situation has now changed quite remarkably. Professional university-based geography, strongly aspiring to the status of a distinctive intellectual discipline, is now in the ascendant. Geographers now seek, by and large, to contribute to what can best be called ‘the technics and mechanics of urban, regional and environmental management’. Like all such epistemological shifts, elements of the new can be discerned in the old (Dudley Stamp’s Land Use Survey of the 1930s surely being the most outstanding example) and residuals from the old are still with us today. But there is no doubt that a major shift in style and in focus has occurred.

How and why did this shift occur? We certainly cannot attribute it to an inner struggle within the intellectual tradition of geography itself (in the fashion, say, of certain shifts in the paradigms of mathematics). It has to be viewed, rather, as an adaptation within geography to external conditions. The end of Empire is in itself sufficient to explain the demise of the old-style geography of the Royal Geographical Society (and it was the end of this era that Wooldridge was heralding). But how are we to explain the transformation to the new style of geography? What were the social necessities that pushed us into concern for the technics and mechanics of urban, regional and environmental management? And why did we move to a professional stance and a university base? To answer these questions we need to say something about our own contemporary history.

If we could return to earth in some future century and if the inhabitants at that time still care (or are able) to write history, then what will the text-books say of the period 1930–70? I suspect that the relevant chapter will be headed: ‘The birth-pangs of the corporate state’. The prototype for the corporate state began to be designed by Bismarck. Mussolini’s Italy (particularly in the early years) developed the model while the appalling excesses of Hitler’s Germany tend to conceal from us the real meaning of the Fascist Form. Today we sit quietly by and observe Spain, Uruguay, Greece, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile… and at home we accept a growing state interventionism in the name of economic stability (Lord Keynes) and distributive justice (Lord Beveridge). It should be clear to us that Western capitalism is undergoing some sort of radical transformation. Each of the advanced capitalist nations has been fumbling its way to some version of the corporate state (Miliband 1969). Exactly how this is manifest in any particular nation depends upon its existing institutional framework, political traditions, ruling ideology, and opportunities for economic growth and development.

How can we characterize the general form of the corporate state as a mode of sociopolitical organization? It appears as a relatively tightknit, hierarchically ordered structure of interlocking institutions – political, administrative, legal, financial, military, and the like – which transmits information downwards and ‘instructs’ individuals and groups down the hierarchy as to what behaviors are appropriate for the survival of society as a whole. The slogan for such an operation is ‘the national interest’. The corporate state is dominated by the ethics of ‘rationality’ and ‘efficiency’ (the two concepts being regarded as interchangeable). Since neither efficiency nor rationality can be defined without a goal, the national interest – the survival of the corporate state – becomes the de facto ‘purpose’. Within the corporate state a ruling class emerges which, in the advanced capitalist nations, is almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of the industrial and financial interests. In the communist nations, many of which have assumed the corporate state form, the ruling elite is drawn from the party.

In Britain, much of the infrastructure for the corporate state was laid by the Labour Party in the name of distributive justice. But it soon became apparent that ‘the social good’ could not be achieved without subsuming it under ‘the national interest’. It has taken the bureaucratic and technocratic conservativism of Edward Heath to demonstrate how far we have come since 1945 and how easily an infrastructure created in the name of distributive justice can be converted into an instrument for class war. There is, of course, resistance. The free-market capitalism promoted by Enoch Powell coincides with deep misgivings on both the left and right as the law, education, research, the social services, all became subservient to the needs of the corporate state. Even the Financial Times (14 January 1974) argues that:

We are now only a decade away from the kind of modem state, with its technological and bureaucratic capacities, that can create and sustain an Orwellian control of the citizen’s life. If we are to avoid the totalitarian systems, so chillingly depicted in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, the law as declared from the courts will need to be deployed ever-increasingly to protect the individual’s rights.

The legal decisions, which were the focus of the Financial Times’ concern, went in favor of the government and against the individual’s rights.

Consistent with this trend towards a corporate-state form of social and political organization, education has increasingly come to be regarded purely as investment in manpower. Concern for individual health, welfare and sanity has been notably lacking in our calculations. We have been forced, as a consequence, to market the graduate in geography as a commodity. The corporate state requires a technically proficient bureaucracy if it is to function. The commodity we now produce is in part tailored to fit the needs of this market in addition to the market for teachers. We also had to ensure appropriate mechanisms for quality control over the production of this commodity – hence the growth of professional standards within the discipline. Research has likewise become a commodity. National priorities and needs (the pervasive national interest once more) condition the market, and we are progressively pushed to sell research to a client who has a specific need – and the client is, increasingly, the government itself.

And what are these ‘national needs and priorities’? Within the over-arching concern for the survival of the corporate state itself, we can distinguish the need for designing and implementing a variety of techniques of manipulation, control and co-optation, such that: (1) economic growth, the rate of accumulation of capital, and the competitive position of the state in world markets, are preserved and enhanced; (2) cyclical crises in the economy can be managed; and (3) discontent can be contained and defused. Geographers have sought to respond to these needs by contributing, in both research and education, to the discovery and diffusion of such techniques in the sphere of urban, regional and environmental management. The tightening structure of the corporate state during the 1960s put more and more pressure on us to move in these directions. We are, by now, more subservient to the state in Britain than ever before. We have, in short, been co-opted. Yet there has been virtually no sign of any resistance on our part. Indeed, it looks as if we have been eager to participate in such a process. We certainly have spent little time worrying about the possible consequences.

The reasons why we have not worried are complex. In the first place, the co-optation of the academic into the corporate-state structure provided certain channels through which the academic could approach the locus of power in society. Whether or not the geographer, qua academic, could exercise real power or not is beside the point – the illusion was enough to gain the acquiescence of that part of us that responds to vaunting personal ambition. More crucial, however, is the mediating power of disciplinary imperialism. Geographers had to demonstrate that geography did indeed have something to contribute to the fulfillment of national needs and priorities. Much of the debate over the nature of geography in the 1960s was, in fact, a debate over how best to fulfill that tacit commitment. This was a question of survival, for universities were by no means persuaded of the necessity to invest in geography. We had to compete with other disciplines and in the process we were forced, if we were to survive as a collectivity, to carve out a niche, to establish a ‘turf’ which it was distinctly ours to command.

And it was, of course, the job of the profession (and the Institute of British Geographers in particular) to establish such...