Geography is deadThe argument that geography is dead, or least less relevant today, put forward by some hyperglobalist economists and other non-geographers may be characterized as follows. Time–space compression renders distance unimportant. Locality has less meaning, since we live in a ‘global village’. Difference is declining and culture homogenizing. Thus, for example, under this argument TNCs are completely ‘footloose’ and spread identical products across the planet. In the cultural sphere, global brands such as Nike or Madonna or the BBC send out identical messages which are interpreted in the same way across world society. This idea sees globalization as deterministic and inevitable, subject to its own inexorable logic. Territories are made less salient by the transcendence of process across and above them.
Geography has new lifeIn contrast, the more realistic argument that geography has new life through globalization may go like this. Distance, as measured in an absolute sense, is indeed less important, but place, space, locality andthe relative distance between these things are not. ‘Global’ processes are actually stretched ‘local to local’ processes, and they unfold in localities that have a unique history and character. In the economic sphere, TNCs choose to locate in particular places due to a complex mixture of local characteristics in the destination area and factors specific to the firm influenced by the nature of their source location. In culture, hybridity becomes the new normality as ‘global’ trends mix with local ones to create new cultures, for example, New Yorican salsa or Polynesian rock. Geography is indeed transforming, both as a concrete reality and as a discipline that seeks to analyse those changes, but it is not irrelevant. This new, highly volatile unevenness makes geography – ‘the study of spatial differentiation’ – more important than ever as the world fragments and recrystallizes along new political, economic, social and cultural lines.