Making Population Geography

Adrian Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780340762646
• eBook ISBN: 9781134633227
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Making Population Geography is a lively account of the intellectual history of population geography, arguing that, while population geography may drift in and out of fashion, it must continue to supplement its demographic approach with a renewed emphasis on cultural and political accounts of compelling population topics, such as HIV-AIDS, sex trafficking, teen pregnancy, citizenship and global ageing, in order for it to shed light on contemporary society.



Making Population Geography draws both on the writings of those like Wilbur Zelinsky and Pat Gober who were at the very epicentre of spatial science in the 1960s and those like Michael Brown and Yvonne Underhill-Sem whose post-punk introspections of method, content and purpose, now push the field in new directions. Using a wide range of case studies, contemporary examples and current research, the book links the rise and fall of the key concepts in population geography to the changing social and economic context and to geographys turn towards social theory.



Referencing the authors classroom experiences both in the US and the UK, Making Population Geography will appeal to students studying geography, population issues and the development of critical scholarship.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203764480-1

Population geography studies the geographic organization of population and how and why this matters to society. This often involves describing where populations are found, how the size and composition of these populations is regulated by the demographic processes of fertility, mortality and migration, and what these patterns of population mean for economic development, ecological change and social issues. For example, suburbanization in the developed global North has been linked back to the migration decisions of many families who leave central cities and relocate on the urban fringe. This type of metropolitan decentralization matters because it contributes to the pressures on rural and ‘green-field’ land, the underfunding of inner-city schools, the continuing segregation of groups in society and the difficulties some ‘suburban’ housewives encounter in finding jobs. Similarly, Malthus’s argument that the size of a population grows more quickly than its food supplies also used the idea that the geographic organization (in this case, the setting) of population could be used to ‘diagnose’ deeper structural problems in society, namely overpopulation and scarcity, and to justify appropriate social and political interventions, namely moral restraint and the reduction of government social support to the poor. The regular historical sequencing of patterns of population growth and decline across northern Europe supported the demographic transition diagnosis that population change was scientifically related to modernization, industrialization and urbanization. In turn, this led to the idea that best-practice (European-experienced) low growth rates could be rationally exported to the global South with government interventions like family planning.

While still important, this is not the only view of how the geographic organization of population matters to society. A number of alternative views address the increasingly diverse and complex links between governments (states) and populations. This enlarged perspective is associated with globalization in several ways. First, states assume different roles and functions under globalization. The footloose nature of some employment opportunities, neo-liberalism and increasing global interdependence all affect how governments think about populations. States have an increasingly problematic relationship with immigrant populations. While many states encourage immigration because immigrants fill jobs nobody is able or prepared to do, cultural insecurities have led to the demonization of some immigrant groups – more often than not dark-skinned and Arabic – and stretched to breaking point government models of inclusion, incorporation and membership in a national community. Second, globalization has availed the state – and other actors, including corporations, non-governmental organizations and trafficking networks – of a new range of technologies, strategies and practices that achieve political, economic and cultural ends through population means. Third, these strategies – and ways to read them – have been enabled by a critique of Enlightenment knowledge, another hallmark of globalization.

Population geography, like other social sciences, has been profoundly affected by these developments in contemporary economic, political and social life. In short, to understand the changing relationships between states and populations, the field has enlarged its focus. Rather than view population groups as the end product of individual demographic events, population geography examines the two-way relationships between the acts, performances, social institutions and discourses that make up these groups and their geographic organization. These enlarged views augment the traditional assumption that population groups are best understood when they are studied as the aggregate outcomes of individual population events, including fertility, mortality and migration. What this has meant in practice is that geography no longer just contains or reflects populations, it also helps create them. This book is about how population geography adds value to our understanding of society by studying both how populations are organized in geography and how populations are organized by and through geography.

Consider retirees, an increasingly influential population. The traditional UN definition of this group is based on an age, 65, the age at which state retirement benefits have been made available. A comparison of the ages of retirement for women reveals geographic differences reflecting the demographic supply of workers and the availability of pension funds. While the use of an age concept to define and understand this population group is statistically convenient, an enlarged view of the retired population shifts attention away from this demographic lifecourse event and considers how later life groups balance the acts of working, home life and leisure through their relationships with places. Accordingly, to be retired is to change the balance between acts of working and acts of not working, that is to change the relationship an individual has between their work life and their home life. Some locales actively enable work lives through subsidized mass transit, permissive attitudes and non-ageist employment practices. Technologies like telecommuting have also opened up new possibilities for combining – and blurring – home and work life. Moreover, at a local and regional scale, the concentration of later-life adults in affinity communities has greatly expanded leisure activities and further undermined the absolutist, age-based approach to retirement.

In common with other areas of human geography, population geography is busy reinventing itself. The second goal of Making Population Geography asks what is new in the field. I explore the proposition that the spatial turn widely observed across the social sciences and humanities has touched population geography. Recent views on how geography matters acknowledge the diversity and complexity of relationships between populations and states under conditions of globalization. The following vignettes, culled from news stories appearing in mid-May 2004 introduce some of the contemporary concerns of the field. They also suggest how ideas about geography and population are shifting:

• Israeli security forces continued to demolish selected houses in the Gaza community of Rafah that they said contained tunnels under the border with Egypt. This occurred against the backdrop of Israel’s planned withdrawal from this part of the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank, land it had acquired militarily in 1967. For Israel, the elimination of these particular Palestinian settlements was necessary to protect its own national security, as it claimed militant groups including Hamas were using the cross-border tunnels as key supply routes for arms. For Palestinian residents, and much of the Arab world, the Israeli actions were another symbol of continuing Israeli aggression toward, and non-recognition of the human rights of, a dispossessed population. This case – often described as the world’s most intractable geopolitical crisis – shows how geographic perspectives on population are an essential component of what at first appears as a political issue concerning where to draw boundaries. When the ‘political’ creation of Israel was brokered in 1948, the act of drawing boundaries created new populations and divided others. Specifically, the displacement of thousands of residents of the former Palestine and the wholesale destruction of over 500 Arab villages ‘created’ a refugee population that is, today, the world’s largest (over 4 million) and longest lasting, comprised of over two generations. Palestinian refugee communities – including Rafah, and like other refugee populations worldwide – lack access to ‘taken-for-granteds’ like human rights, protection, territorially rooted homelands and land that can support reasonable livelihoods. Refugee populations are some the world’s poorest, most insecure, most fragile and most dependent communities. While poverty and endemic insecurity characterize Palestinian refugees – ironically, similar experiences have applied to large parts of Jewish history – the contemporary Israeli state is both threatened by the co-presence of this refugee community and complicit/active in its maintenance, through acts such as the above. Not unconnected to their economic and political disempowerment, the growth rate of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories exceeds that of the Israeli population, prompting Israel to project this differential growth rate as part of its ongoing security concern in the area and promote the construction of new Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank (the doctrine of ‘Judaification’, Agnew 2002: 31). The fate of many recent Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank appears today as another stumbling block in the peace process. Understanding the location, growth and economic and cultural characteristics of populations tells us much about the antecedents of geopolitical conflicts and may flag new routes to peace.
• Tuberculosis (TB) was a leading cause of death among young men and women in many North American cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Medical discoveries about the spread of the disease and childhood vaccinations helped arrest TB and case mortality rates declined steadily during the century. However, by the early 1990s, figures from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggested that TB had re-emerged in many inner-city areas of the USA. Decomposing these figures by place of birth suggested that foreign-born persons were eight times more likely to die from TB than native-born Americans. Immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, India and China had the highest case mortality rates of any ‘population’ group. CDC data suggested that while immigrants accounted for more than 50 per cent of TB deaths in just four states in 1992, they accounted for more than 50 per cent of TB deaths in 22 states in 2002. The deepening association between TB and immigration was most starkly illustrated in the seven states where 70 per cent of all TB deaths were of immigrants: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Hampshire. Media concerns have been raised about how increased global interconnectedness and mobility is contributing to the rapid spread of TB and other infectious and parasitic diseases (IPDs) like HIV-AIDS, SARS and the Ebola virus. By studying the geographic context of disease, it becomes apparent that TB is less a marker of immigration than it is of poverty (Farmer 1999). Rising TB levels in areas of the former Soviet Union and Haiti suggest that unemployment, poor access to underfunded health care systems and stress all elevate risk. Rather than ‘blame’ immigrants for bringing IPDs to the shores of the USA, causality may be reversed and immigrants may be developing TB once inside the USA. Geographic perspectives on ‘biomedical’ characteristics of populations place disease – and health and wellness more generally – in its economic (for example, access to jobs), social (for example, access to health care) and political (for example, anti-immigrant rhetoric) setting. Concentrations of TB among immigrants in non-traditional destination states may suggest poor agricultural working conditions, barriers to accessing health care and concentrations of refugee groups in unhealthy areas.
• On 1 May 2004 the European Union enlarged to include ten ‘new’ members: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. Overnight, this additional 75 million people created the world’s most influential (in terms of purchasing power) consumer market of over 500 million persons. Media coverage of this newly created population focused on the extent to which impoverished and unskilled young adults from Central and Eastern Europe would cross into the old West seeking jobs and social support and overwhelming local resources. On the flip side, the media spotlight also fell on those trained as dentists, nurses and teachers in countries like Poland, who could help countries like Britain meet sectoral shortages of suitably qualified workers. Political entities create populations to solve economic problems. On one level, allowing labour mobility (within the Eurozone) is argued to be in Europe’s overall advantage by smoothing out labour supply and demand. At another level, however, ‘old’ Europe was reacting to an impending population crisis in a particularly geographic way. Demographic ageing was leading to a shrinking supply of new workers in key industrial nations, including the big four, Italy, Britain, France and Germany. Seen as a demographic crisis, the response of recruiting guest workers from former colonies had exacted a very high political price, which included anti-immigrant rhetoric and the growth of far right movements. By enlarging in the geographical (and historical) direction it did, Europe was able to welcome a new generation of young (and European) workers to its labour force without further worsening its growing identity crisis. This case illustrates the importance of demographic interdependence, with patterns of population demand (consumption) and supply (labour force entrants) linked to fertility, immigration and ageing. It also suggests that previous population fixes, like guest worker programmes, combined with the historical tactics that governments have used to maintain such population groups (through national membership models of assimilation and pluralism) may constrain future political possibilities. Geographic perspectives on population thus highlight demographic and historical interdependencies.
• Same-sex marriage became legal in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As such, this US state recognized that gay and lesbian partners who married each other could expect the same legal rights as heterosexual partners. This meant equal treatment regarding the adoption of children and equal accessibility to benefits payable to one partner on the death of the other. Gay marriage is part of the diversification and pluralization of household forms and structures underway in contemporary society. Gay marriage also asks us to rethink the basis of family life as one not only defined around natural sex and reproduction but also based on the commitment of partners to one another (i.e. from the biological to the social). Both candidates for the US presidential nomination publically expressed their opposition to the Massachusetts legislation. Geographic perspectives illuminate this case study in several ways. Here the state is trumping biological over social bases of relationships. There is a geography to same-sex marriage legislation. Massachusetts, San Francisco and the Netherlands have all witnessed attempts to legalize gay marriage. All have concentrations of gay and lesbian groups in positions of economic and political power. An emerging global geography reflects not just factors of absolute location but relative location as well. The Australian prime minister firmly identified with George Bush’s opposition to the legislation, saying that what was important was to recognize Australia’s long history of heterosexual marriage as a building block of society. While the opposition shared the same view, queer groups said opposition to gay marriage amounted to a new apartheid based on sexual preference. Taiwanese legislators have seen the debate differently. Keen to appear as a modern and cosmopolitan member of the global community, support for same-sex marriage here references the desire to protect basic human rights (such as being in a consensual relationship). While local and national governments continue to debate who gets what rights, many employers have already extended in kind benefits and rights (for example, insurance policies, pensions) to their same-sex partnered employees. The multinational reach of large employers further complicates the geographies of same-sex marriage and suggests that players other than states are increasingly involved in population matters.
• Michelle Smith, a high school girl living in the English East Midlands, had a chemical abortion. While a major event in her life, this type of population act rarely makes the news. On this occasion the 14-year-old had received abortion counselling in her school and decided against informing her mother of her decision to abort. An abortion was then arranged for her. Maureen Smith, her mother, did not find out about the termination until after the event. Abortion is an emotive issue and this story raises questions about rights: of the unborn child, of the mother and father, of the parent, of the school and of the government. Should a parent have the right to know about the advice being given to a dependant for whom they are legally responsible? Does a teenager have a right to withhold information from a parent and, if so, in what circumstances? These questions about rights in turn raise issues about the definition and meaning of population performances, including parenthood and childhood/adolescence. Once based on biological relationships defined by a parent–child bond and age, both parenting and childhood are increasingly understood in social terms. The case illustrated how it was not Michelle’s age that mattered, but her social maturity. Geography again matters as population performances like parenting and childhood/adolescence are being renegotiated in contemporary society. Where these renegotiations take place is crucial. Michelle received and acted on advice in the familiar surroundings of her school. Britain has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in Europe and a policy to provide health care counselling to teens in those places seen as the heart of their communities, including schools. The strategic ‘placing’ of information and advice, with knock-on effects for the relationship between the government, parents and teens, represents another dimension of state influence over population matters.
• The moderate Islamic Sudanese government had just signed a long-awaited agreement to end years of conflict with rebel groups in the dominantly Christian south of the country. The civil war had uprooted millions of Sudanese and created the largest population of internally displaced persons – groups deserving of refugee status but who remain within a national border and thus out of reach of international intervention – during the late twentieth century. While many were justifiably heralding the new peace, charities, aid agencies, Amnesty International and the UN continued to report an impending humanitarian disaster in the western Sudan region of Darfur. Here, nomadic pastoralist ‘Arab’ groups were allegedly being backed by Sudanese army special forces in their ongoing skirmishes with ‘black African’ farmers. Local Arab militias, known as janjawid, were said to have adopted a scorched earth policy, razing entire African villages to the ground, raping women, killing over 10,000 and displacing between 1 and 2 million persons; 22 per cent of the region’s children under five had already developed acute malnutrition as crops had either not been planted due to the instability or had failed as water systems were compromised. Some in the international community accused the Sudanese government of cynical contempt for its population, as it collected accolades for its new policy towards the south on the one hand, but turned a blind eye to or, worse, actively supported repression in the west. Others turned the blame on an international system of protection that had failed Sudan’s already large internally displaced population; the same system that had similarly failed the 800,000 Rwandans massacred exactly ten years before and that seemed to be about to fail the millions already displaced in Darfur. The case also reveals how governments wage war against populations inside their borders by emphasizing religious differences (Islamic and Christian beliefs in the southern dispute), racial and ethnic differences between groups (brownskinned Arabs and black-skinned Africans in Darfur), by destroying environments which support population livelihoods and by destroying the places and settlements which define the cultural homes of (pastoral) populations. While debates continue about the extent to which the Darfur crisis is an example of a race-based genocide, an example of ethnic cleansing or the latest round in an ongoing dispute between contrasting ways of life, the case again highlights how states variously create and react to their own, and global, population issues.

Several themes emerge from these situations. Population issues continue to matter to society, in ways that touch upon geopolitics, economic expansion, livelihood systems, consumption, social structures and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series-Preface Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Knowledge, geography and population
• Chapter 3 The rise of a modern population geography
• Chapter 4 The end of population geography (as we knew it)
• Chapter 5 Alternative futures
• Chapter 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index