Hillary,
I really wish I had time to reply to this post in more detail but I just
wanted to point out that the geographically-homogenous world you describe
is nothing more than a hideously superficial reading.
Malls, motorways, holiday resorts, air travel, city centres, shopping, the
Internet, Network news... all these geographies are important areas of
study for the discipline at the moment.
Reifying 'good old geographies' is not going to make the subject more
attractive or ensure that school pupils enjoy and engage with it.
And, if you really think that the bullring says nothing about local
geographies or that TV coverage doesn't illumanate important mediated
geographies of broadcast than I think you should take a longer, harder,
look.
Paul
> Following Dr Canning's comments (lack of geog in schools also widely
> reported
> on in newspapers today), maybe many ordinary people feel they don't need
> geography.
> For example, 1) many 'cloned' high streets/shopping malls look the same
> anyway.
> 2) So do the motorways we use to get to these retail malls, it takes far
> less
> geographical knowledge to hop on the M6 to the Trafford centre, for
> example,
> from say Stafford than it would have taken 40 years ago to drive, on A
> roads,
> from Stafford to Manchester
> 3) Holiday resorts, also 'cloned' ...and if we fly to them we don't need
> to
> know the geography of that over which we are passing, hidden by clouds
> anyway
> (that's if you can see out of the window in cattle class anyway, and if
> you can
> there's generally a big wing in the way, which however doesn't obstruct
> the
> view out of the elite class windows up at the front of the plane.
> 4) ...As are many city centres worldwide, a sort of 'globalised'
> architecture
> of tower blocks, freeways, car parks, big shopping boxes, etc - enlivened
> by
> the occasional bit of eclectic building like Birmingham's Bulllring
> (hubcap
> city), but even this is devoid of any geographical markers like local
> style.
> 5) Modern communiactions, email, the Internet, also annihilate distance.
> We
> even lose the minimalistic geography gleanable from stamps or increased
> postal
> charges to more distant countries.
> 6) TV coverage of events in foreign countries also has very little
> geographical context, mainly concentrating on bombs/massacres/political
> unrest/earthquakes/floods etc etc but little spatial context of how these
> events fit in with
> rest of world or link ultimately to us here in UK.
>
> OK so if we don't want the world to end up like Forster's 'The Machine
> Stops'
> (look how that story ended ! ) - (sorry, Fukiyama, not so optimistic as
> you),
> we probably do need an appreciation of geography, but professional
> geographers are going to have to make that plain to the 99.9%
> non-geographer population
> out there.
>
> Dr Hillary Shaw
> www.fooddeserts.org
>
|