Space: Inequality

Electronic communications have played an especially important role in removing barriers to interaction between people who are physically far from each other. Physical barriers, such as oceans and deserts, can still limit interaction among people. In the modern world, barriers to interaction are more likely to derive from unequal access to electronics.

Instantaneous electronic communications were once viewed as the “death” of geography because the ease of communications between distant places removed barriers to interaction. In reality, because of unequal access, geography matters even more than before.

Opportunities for interaction are unequal in part because the quality of electronic service varies among places. Internet access depends on availability of electricity to power the computer or recharge a smartphone or tablet. Broadband service requires proximity to a digital subscriber line (DSL), a cable line, or other services. Most importantly, a person must be able to afford to pay for the communications equipment and service. Poorer people may be excluded from financial services, jobs, and information readily available online to more affluent people.

Geographic Thought

Geographers take a range of approaches to cultural identity and space, including those of poststructuralist, humanistic, and behavioral geography. Poststructuralist geography examines how the powerful in a society dominate, or seek to control, less powerful groups, how the dominated groups occupy space, and confrontations that result from the domination. Poststructuralist geographers understand space as the product of ideologies or value systems of ruling elites.

Some postructuralist geographers have studied how, although it is illegal to discriminate against people of color, local governments have pursued policies that impose hazardous, polluting industries on minority neighborhoods. For example, the 100,000 residents of Flint, Michigan, were exposed to high levels of lead in their drinking water beginning in 2014, a situation that took many years to address.

After a state of emergency was declared in 2016, Flint residents were instructed to use only bottled or filtered water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. The crisis began when the water department changed its source of water to the Flint River, and failed to treat it properly. As a result, lead from aging pipes leached into the water supply. Critics charged that switching the source of water was done to cut costs in a city comprising more than 50 percent African Americans, an unemployment rate of around 25 percent, and a median income less than one-half the U.S. average

Flint Water Crisis

Residents of Flint, Michigan march to the city’s water treatment plant, chanting, “No pipes, no peace,” demanding swift restoration of drinkable water.

Humanistic geography emphasizes the different ways that individuals form ideas about place and give those places symbolic meanings. For example, LGBTQ people may be attracted to places such as the Castro District in San Francisco because they perceive them as LGBTQ-friendly spaces where they can interact socially with other LGBTQ people. The Castro may be seen as offering an accepting location for LGBTQ people through inclusive policies and business practices.

The Castro District, San Francisco

The neighborhood has a large number of places that are significant in the development of identity for LGBTQ people.

Similarly, African Americans can find themselves in an urban neighborhood they perceive to be “white space.” A community that is comfortable for a white person can be uncomfortable and unwelcoming to an African American.

Uneven Development

Global culture and economy are increasingly centered on the three core, or hearth, regions of North America, Europe, and East Asia. These three regions have a large percentage of the world’s advanced technology, capital to invest in new activities, and wealth to purchase goods and services. Surrounding the core are developing countries on the periphery with limited access to the world centers of consumption, communications, wealth, and power, which are clustered in the core. The increasing gap in economic conditions between regions in the core and periphery that results from the globalization of the economy is known as uneven development

Inequality: Income Gap Between Rich and Poor Countries

Income per capita has increased much more rapidly in developed countries than in developing ones. Chapter 10 discusses specific ways to measure economic differences, including GNI PPP.

From “command centers” in the three major world cities of New York, London, and Tokyo, key decision makers employ modern telecommunications to send orders to factories, shops, and research centers around the world—an example of hierarchical diffusion (see under Expansion Diffusion in this chapter). Meanwhile, “nonessential” employees of the companies can be relocated to lower-cost offices outside the major financial centers. For example, Apple maintains corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California, but most of the parts in its phones, tablets, and computers are made in Asian countries, primarily China, India, Japan, and South Korea.

People in peripheral regions, who once toiled in isolated farm fields to produce food for their families, now produce crops for sale in core regions or have given up farm life altogether and migrated to cities in search of jobs in factories and offices. As a result, the global economy has produced greater disparities than in the past between the levels of wealth and well-being enjoyed by people in the core and in the periphery.

In a global culture and economy, every area of the world plays some role intertwined with the roles played by other regions. Workers and cultural groups that in the past were largely unaffected by events elsewhere in the world now share a single economic and cultural world with other workers and cultural groups. The fate of an autoworker in Detroit is tied to investment decisions made in Mexico City, Seoul, Stuttgart, and Tokyo.

Inequality Within Countries

Unequal access and economic inequality have also increased within countries. In the United States, the share of the national income held by the wealthiest 1 percent increased from 24 percent in 1979 to 40 percent in 2017, according to the Federal Reserve Bank. The share of Americans living in poverty has increased during that same period from 12 percent to 13 percent.

Inequality: Income Gap Within The United States

The share of wealth held by the wealthiest 1 percent in the United States declined from the 1930s through the 1970s and began rising in the 1980s. The percentage of people living in poverty declined during the 1960s but has remained relatively unchanged since then.

Inequality in the distribution of wealth within the United States has been mapped in an innovative way by Sasha Trubetskoy as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. One-half of the economic activity in the United States is clustered in a handful of small areas comprising well under 1 percent of the country’s land area

Inequality Within The United States

The map created by Sasha Trubetskoy shows that one-half of the economic activity in the United States is clustered in a handful of urban areas, especially along the East and West Coasts.