All Human References (Paper 1)

• Context and composition are not mutually exclusive but places encompass both the people within them and the wider environment

• People of higher socioeconomic status often have better access to resources, money, knowledge, power and networks that promote better health

• Place is an ecosystem made up of people, systems and structures so to separate context and composition is to oversimplify

• Health varies with age, ethnicity, occupation, physical environments and social/spatial inequalities

• Historical events such as C19th industrialisation or Thatcherism can also impact health

Bambra, 2016

• The second Marmot Review highlighted that people can now expect to spend more of their lives in poor health

• Improvements to life expectancy have stalled and health inequalities grow

Marmot et al., 2020

• Income inequality and health have been linked in the US, UK and Brazil; often interpretations of this ignore contextual determinants

• Income inequality can impact health through perceptions of place in a social hierarchy leading to antisocial behaviour, reduce participation and low community cohesion

• There is a clustering of conditions impacting population health interacting with hierarchy impacts

• Social capital in terms of trust, belonging and volunteering could be more important than economic GDP

Lynch et al., 2000

• ‘People make places, and places make people’ shows the interconnectedness of context and composition

• To separate context and composition is to oversimplify the relationship between place and health where it acts like an ecosystem

Macintyre & Ellaway, 2003

• Clustering can see unemployed people living near other unemployed people

• On small scales, places can create conditions such as pollution but also perceptions on health and healing

• Places where fewer people are ill would be expected to have higher levels of social capital and community showing the connection

• On smaller scales, differences in health are often seen as a product of the individual but internationally area affects are often seen as more important

• The history of a place is important in the life course of the place as well as genetic inheritance

Tunstall et al., 2004

• Greenspace creates a venue for exercising to improve physical and mental health

• It can also be sen to improve cognitive functioning and sleep quality

• Those with greater greenspace deprivation levels have been shown to have shorter life expectancies that those less deprived

The Health Foundation, 2024

• Wellbeing is a network of reinforced individual, community and place impacts that are often associated with use of green space, civic agency and neighbourhood cohesion

• The individual and context of a place are in a reciprocal relationship as one’s health will be based on the resources available as well as other factors

• Individual factors have been seen to be the strongest predictors of well-being as financial difficulties and physical health have strong connections to poorer wellbeing

• Individuals often do not have control over place based conditions such as COVID limiting access to greenspace

• Joint decision making is important in increasing feelings of civic agency, neighbourhood purpose and optimism

• Hearth is important as it informs on wider policy, future work should unpack more complex relationships

McElroy et al., 2021

• Place is often underestimated in its contribution to disease risk, this should be understood better to inform policy interventions

• Context of place is importance as it constitutes social relations and physical resources

• Relational perspectives are important in understanding how context impacts health through feedback loops and dynamic natures of place

• Power relations are important as actors control and maintain health influencing factors, there can be places of prescription or negotiation and exogenous processes can also impact local places

• Access to resources is not necessarily the same as geographical proximity, relative position is important

Cummins et al., 2007

• Multilevel modelling allows for better separation of individual and contextual factors seeing how there can be direct and indirect impacts of the two

• There should be better frameworks and comparisons used for understanding health outcomes as well as the dynamic nature of places subject to processes such as migration

• There is a focus on context which may take the blame away from the individual and onto the government

• It is time for more interconnected and humanistic theories of health variation, it is not isolated but policy should strive for greater depth

Smyth, 2008

• The Dahlgren-Whitehead rainbow model broadens horizons to allow people to think beyond the health sector into local environments, it escapes the idea that health is determined by formal health services

• It allows people to work together on a common goal with each sector taking responsibility, it is easy to understand and includes more than just risk

• It consists of layers and focuses on health as a whole rather than specific diseases

• The model is not about inequality and is not an analytical tool but simply a visual representation

• In the future it aims for better illustrations of links, focus on commercial determinants and the idea of racism as a driving force

Dahlgren & Whitehead, 2021

• Minority ethnic groups have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 through multiple pathways as a result of social processes and hidden structural racism

• Ethnicity is a socially constructed idea tat causes inequalities to rise through broader social mechanisms

• There are impacts of differential expose, vulnerability, disease consequences, social consequences, effectiveness or control measures and adverse consequences of control measures all leading to unequal health outcomes

• Ethnicity must be better understood in order for action to be more meaningful

Katikireddi et al., 2021

• The Preston curve states a strong positive relationship between national incomes and life expectancy in poorer countries and also sees that this relationship is changing with life expectancy increasing at all levels

• There is a dispute over which mechanisms is the most important

• The relationship is also true for individuals speaking of their relative income and how it places them in the social hierarchy

• Arguments for redistribution lack evidence from the curve but there is clear importance of technological innovation and resource allocation

• There may be a reverse link between health and wealth that would have important implications for economic development and poverty reduction

Bloom & Canning, 2007

• We are affected differently by income differences within our own society than between one society and another

• It is not your actual income level that matters, but instead how you compare yourself with others from the same society shown as poor health and violence are more common in more unequal societies

• Inequality causes created anxiety and defensive self esteem resulting from increasing social evaluative threat causing higher levels of stress, this is now amplified by a more mobile population seeing familiar faces often replaced by constant fluxes of strangers

• Greater inequality increases status competition and increases status anxiety, this can lead to greater self-promotion with the idea of more inequality produced as a result

• In order to create a better society we must prioritise liberty, equality and fraternity

Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010

• Jen et al. refutes the inequality hypothesis yet this is based on self-rated health data which is inappropriate for international comparison 

• There are high political stakes of understanding if the effect is due to context or composition as it effects support for redistribution policies from the rich

• In more unequal rich countries although health is worse, people are less likely to kill themselves than in more equal societies

• In more equal societies it is harder to blame others or the system for your woes meaning concerns become internalised; people are also less likely to pretend that they are well and judge their situations better 

• In more equal societies, you have a health service to fall back on so you do not have to convince yourself you are fit and healthy, therefore self-rated health would be lower

Dorling & Barford, 2009

• Wilkinson presents a contextual argument for relating inter-country variations in mortality rates to income inequalities, Gravelle counters this by stating a compositional approach is sufficient 

• This study uses multilevel modelling to sustain the case that is is compositional rather than contextual variable that account for inter-country variations in health status

Jen et al., 2008

• Analysis of Wilkinson’s hypothesis that individuals will be less healthy the greater the lack of social cohesion in a country, this was shown in self-rated health data and provides insight into countries such as former Soviet Bloc regions and Scandinavia

• Wilkinson claims that in advances societies, it is not material disadvantage that is the most important determinant but instead psychosocial feelings associated with relative deprivation

• This was shown as there was a correlation between lower social cohesion and worse health, this also extended Wilkinson’s hypothesis to non-Western countries

• Income inequality may be linked to this by worsening social cohesion, but this requires more research 

• By living in a trustful society stress levels are reduced and therefore associated physiological stresses reduced, this was not found on the individual level probably due to altered contextual factors

Jen et al., 2010

• Proposes a framework based on the premise that all social and economic determinants of child mortality operate through a common set of biological mechanisms (proximate determinants) to impact mortality 

• This bridges the gap between traditional social and medical methodologies to create a more coherent framework that can advance research on social policy and medical interventions to improve child survival in developing countries

• The key advantage of the model lies in its organisation of seemingly disparate factors that interlink to determine child health, it highlights the need to understand the multifactorial origins of child mortality 

• More research and intervention will help to determine which factors are of key importance and should be changed in order to increase child survival

Mosely & Chen, 1984

• Preston saw that national income levels were positively related to increasing life expectancy but also that the relationship shifts upwards overtime due to medical developments; but there are problems with this as income may act as a proxy for wider socioeconomic developments 

• Educational attainment is seen to be a better predictor than income as it does not diminish at higher levels and does not leave an unexplained shift over time explained by other factors, this was validated in studies on 174 countries from 1970-2015

• This is due to education  leading to cognitive changes affecting risk perception, planning and access to information promoting health-related behaviours and use of healthcare facilities

• This means education levels should be promoted in policy

Lutz & Kebede, 2018

• Ethiopia is an example of a high achieving gaining 3.03 years on its expected life expectancy due to positive efforts in education, gender, health systems, employment, food security, affordable housing and civil organisations

• The US is a low achieve losing 2.87 years on its expected life expectancy due to neoliberalism creating inequality, high rates of poverty and unemployment 

• There is low gender equality, a complex health system combined with bad health behaviours, high levels of income inequality, a lack of affordable housing and low participation rates

• These inequalities also lead to worse social outcomes outside of health

Freeman et al., 2020

• The epidemiologic transition focuses on changes in patterns of health and disease and the interactions between these patterns and their demographic, economic and sociological determinants and consequences 

• The model has three stages: the age of pestilence and famine, age of receding pandemics and the age of degenerative and man-made diseases 

• At each stage mortality declines and life expectancy increases

• There is a gradual shift seeing a decline in infectious diseases and an increase in cancer and cardiovascular diseases, this is down to ecobiological, socioeconomic and medical factors with medical factors having a greater influence on more recent mortality declines in the Global South

• The most profound changes in health and disease during the transition occur among children and young women; the model also interacts with changing demographic and socioeconomic factors

• There are three variations of the model to represent changes in pace, pattern, determinants and consequences of population change; these are the classical Western model, the accelerated model and the contemporary/delayed model

Omran, 2005

• The Age of Degenerative and Man-made Diseases was a plateau in epidemiologic history, the major causes of death were degenerative diseases and life expectancy reached 70 which was seen to the around the biological limit to life

• In the US around the mid-1960s mortality from degenerative diseases began to rapidly decrease forming a new stage of the transition

• This was caused by a new older section of the population being formed, a focus on degenerative diseases in healthcare through new drugs, treatments, diagnosis etc. to postpone deaths by degenerative diseases; also reductions in major risk factors and inequalities in access to healthcare for the elderly and poor

• This formed a new era in epidemiologic history were there were rapid declines in deaths from major degenerative diseases and life expectancy rises to around 80 in the ‘Age of Delayed Degenerative Diseases’

Olshansky & Ault, 1986

• In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in infectious diseases such as Ebola, malaria, Hepatitis C, HIV etc. such of which can be attributed to the resistance of vectors to insecticides and microbes to antibiotics

• Aging populations, globalisation, environmental factors and changing transmission also play a part in this re-emergence

• This sees a Fifth stage arise associated with a re-emergence of IPDs and a shift towards affecting older ages; these aging groups have weaker immune systems and are often clustered in healthcare facilities promoting spread

• This could be seen as a re-emergence of the First stage but recognising the risks is more important than a definitive label

Olshansky et al., 1998

• Public health policy in industrialised societies is being reconfigured to improve population health and address inequalities in the social distribution of health

• There is a need to tackle not the social determinants of health, but the social process underpinning unequal distribution

• Often even as absolute inequalities reduce, relative inequalities between socio-economic groups remain which has negative consequences for health overall

Graham, 2004

• Health is defined as a state of ‘complete physical, mental and social well-being’ and crucially ‘not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ 

• This understands the multifaceted dimensions of health, but simply physical or mental but a holistic measure of wellbeing

World Health Organisation, 2024

• Cambridge is essentially a market town with grand historic buildings set in narrow streets, the historic core is its defining character

• Trade and commerce dominate the centre with the market square at the heart with colourful stalls selling a variety of goods

• Town buildings reflect the original market town economy

Cambridge City Council, 2003

• The media age in Cambridge is around 31 years, lower than England average 

• 2.7% of people were born in India and 2.4% in China

• 14.8% identify as Asian with one of the largest increases overtime seen in this ethnic group

ONS, 2023

• Culture began as a noun of process before beginning to develop into a new social and intellectual movement

• It now describes intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of ways of life as well as artistic or intellectual works as cultural artefacts

• Hostility has been connected to claims of superior knowledge and creating distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture

Williams, 1985

• Geographers do not simply take photos but they make them by taking an active role in creating framings for analysis 

• The photo form is ambiguous as it preserves singular moments, in sites of constant activity and change such as cities this is problematic

Arnold, 2021

• Cambridge is a world-renowned centre of science and innovation that blends historical wonder, natural beauty and academic prestige

• It is one of the UK’s top innovation centres but faces problems with housing affordability, water supplies, congestion and lack of laboratory space

• The university makes a total net economic impact of nearly £30 billion to support wider Cambridge ecosystems and economic health

• Population growth in Cambridge has been historically higher than other UK cities which causes challenges for house prices and congestion levels

GOV.UK, 2024

• Landscapes are organic and constantly developing, every landscape is unorganised and singular

• Geography is based on the union between physical and cultural elements of landscape by blending physical ecology and cultural expression

• ‘Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result’

• The natural landscape is important for supplying materials for the formation of the cultural landscape but the shaping force is culture

Sauer, 1925

• Reconceptualising culture is important for turning attention to processes and relationships with other spheres of life, the reification of culture is a fallacy and we should instead focus on the development of the idea of culture

• Super-organicism is denied to see culture as socially constructed and actively constrained by social actors

• It is a powerful idea and within it there are systems of race and gender struggles created by language, discourse, class and ideology

• By understanding culture as an idea we can better understand how it functions as well as understanding systems of power that impose meaning on the everyday

Mitchell, 1995

• Culture is a lens of knowing in a meaningful way of life through spatialities of care, ethics and justice

• The idea of the encounter is key to cultural landscapes of care as well as the built environment shaping such social encounters

• Changing cultural landscapes impact spatialities of care, who we care for and what we care about; togetherness and solidarity are conditioned through cultural expectations

• Landscapes serve as a framework to make sense of how power is culturally manifested through everyday encounters

Lin et al., 2022

• Places are where cultures, communities and people root and define themselves; they are produced from an ongoing composition of traces over the local and global that combine to allow past traces to define a current place

• The cultural world is produced through the acts in which individuals engage with everyday which demonstrate power, power has the ability to make places and cultural systems

• Power can be used by dominating groups to create cultural control, these can also be disobeyed in transgressions to transform embedded cultural orthodoxies

Anderson, 2021

• Postcolonial theory is a tool for critical undoing of knowledge and reveals colonial origins of space, it recognises the continued and troubling presence of colonialism after the colonial period

• It has roots in Said’s ‘Orientalism’ as it considers how we think about distant places in a geographical and postcolonial enquiry

• This Is seen in the example of India’s colonisation and how this was aided by mapping as well as the legacy that continues in the containing idea of exoticism

Jazeel, 2012

• The superorganic status reified culture by giving it a causative power and ontological status, this has been passed through cultural geographers but now has much criticism 

• The superorganic lacks empirical evidence, there is no such thing as an individual apart from culture and it is a German romantic idea that does not exist; culture as legitimate should be rejected

• The world described by the superorganic theory is one in which the individual is absent and there is a lack of inquiry into social interactions

• In the 1940s there was a new conception of man as conscious, self-interested and has a role in the content 

• Culture is not a determinant but rather a context for choice operating on a variety of scales and in different ways, it is a set of traditions that guide action rather than a powerful force

Duncan et al., 1980

• Links performativity and bodily practices in nonrepresentational theory

• This theory is about the practices of the mundane and everyday, it focuses on the ‘body subject’ to emphasize practices that cannot be spoken, that words cannot capture and texts cannot convey but instead experiences and movement that are only cognitive

• Non-representational theory moves away from a concern with representation and text as this values what is spoken or written over multi-sensual practices and experiences

• Dance is a particularly important expression, but this can be used to develop a wider set of ideas around bodily-practices, performativity and dance theory

Thrift, 1996

• Dance has become geography along with a new language of performativity to challenge the conceptual basis of cultural geography by paying attention to performance and practice 

• Theory on dance and performativity stems from feminist work on the performance of gender as Butler saw that gender did not exist outside of doing but was a reiteration of previous performances that had become naturalised as gender norms

• Thrift furthered this in non representational theory moving away from a concern with representation and text to multi sensual practices and experiences, he saw dance as an expression of free, uncontrolled movement 

• Dance is not apart from language but instead is a complex intersection of speech, writing, text and the body; it is always mediated and regulated in specific contexts which reveals more of the colonial, racist and classist histories under the display

• Dance can create identity on gender, sex and ethnic levels; dancing differently can be an act of resistance

Nash, 2000

• Power is not found in the exchanges between subjects, but it is in the very production of the binary frame of ‘male’ and ‘female’ that thinks about gender

• Being female is not a natural fact, but a cultural performance due to the repetition of constrained acts that produce the body in a gendered norm

• The female is no longer a stable notion as the political stakes of designating the origins of gender are revealed in a genealogical critique

• ‘Drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself’ shows how drag exposes the social construction of gender identities

Butler, 1990

• The actor-network theory has three main points of origin in sociology attempting to treat nature and science synaptically, in a rebellion to French epistemology and inspired by Michel Serres’ attitude to time and space

• It is an ‘infra-physical’ language mapping out the traces of networks through figures that set them going and keep them at work 

• The framework helps us see things that were previously concealed by categorised ways of thinking, this moves away from hierarchies of size and shows that categories always mediate between each other

• Actors in networks need not be human but simply make shifts in space and time, this moves away from a world of categories to a world of hybrids

• This also moves away from ‘tyrannical’ to ‘philosophical’ geography where the world is no longer understood in terms of proximity and Nature/Society divides, they seek to restore the multiplicity of the world

Bingham & Thrift, 2000

• Natureculture is a synthesis of nature and culture recognising their inseparability in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed

• This emerges from scholarly interrogations of dualisms deeply embedded in intellectual history (human/animal, nature/culture) as these dualisms tend to dissociate humans and nature but anthropology not mediates between these to identify connectivity and synthetic properties of entities previously opposed

• Natureculture is linked to the emergence of ethnoprimatology mixing cultural, economic and political elements of traditional primatology to conceptualise humans as an interactive zone for primates

• This is shown in Bali as populations and tourists live alongside long-tailed macaques in a mutual ecology where their lives intertwine

Malone & Ovenden, 2016

• Cultural geography in the UK has been concerned with the politics of representation and identity seeing the matter of nature somewhat marginalised; but now geographers find their way back to the connections between the Earth and life

• There is a return to the rich conjunction between the bio (life) and the geo (earth) shifting the register that the materiality of the world is articulated through the environment and land influencing human beings; the impact of technologies and non-human life marks a shift to a ‘more-than-human’ approach to the world

• There is a shift away from humanistic approaches to landscapes seeing that the landscape is co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and the alive Earth

• The characteristics of things are always in the making and humans are composed due to connection with non-humanity in a web of connection

Whatmore, 2006

• Attention to animals stretches back to Aristotle, livestock in agriculture, symbols and themes, hierarchies, pets, circus representations etc., it is now new

• Animals have reemerged in the last several decades as a more frequent focus of scholarship suggesting new relationships between scholars and their subjects and the roles of animals in the past and present 

• There are issues and contentions with the definition of humans and animals as the same but also different, how this association is used to break down boundaries but also reinforces them

• The study of animals has become respectable and population but remains marginal, this marginal location supplies it power and appeal and it can challenge settled assumptions and relationships

Ritvo, 2007

• The zoo is an institution inscribing various human strategies for domesticating, mythologising and aestheticising the animal universe; the Adelaide Zoo uses many discursive frames and practices through which animals are fashioned and delivered to the South Australian public

• Visual technologies move from menagerie-style caging, Fairgrounds and naturalistic enclosures that craft the human experience of nature

• This is not a ‘natural’ setting but one deliberately set aside for human recreation; the suburban backyard is a natural setting in which human routine interventions with nature see the suburbs become ecosystems for wildlife and humans to coexist

• The zoo is socially constructed, it is a social function inscribing human strategies for domesticating; they tell stories of boundary making activities

• Animals are the medium on which humans inscribe a cultural sense of distance from the realm of nature

Anderson, 1995

• Decolonial scholarship seeks to build on and go beyond postcolonialism, it is a long-term processes involving many strands of divesting colonial power

• Although the formal colonial rule has ended, many forms of knowledge through which the world is explained are rooted in Euro-American claims pronouncing universal truths

• Decolonial scholars continue to examine enduring Western influences, frameworks and political inspiration whilst encouraging a rethinking of the world from the perspectives of marginalised academic in the global South 

• Modernity co-emerged with coloniality meaning that colonial power is not situated elsewhere but continue to evolve within everything

• There should be a reorienting of work allowing analytics insight into power pointing to how racialised knowledge production have influenced the experiences of Black, Indigenous and marginalised people

• Diverse knowledges should be bought in and contrasted with one another to form a more diverse background; decolonising requires caution, guidance and humility

Radcliffe, 2017

• There is no clearly defined structure that neatly traces and binds decolonial geographies, they are diverse and interconnected; a constellation in formation of co-resistance existing within embodied theories of liberation

• Constellations are formed as the embodied knowledge of Indigenous peoples comes into dialogue with Black and dispossessed peoples to understand how colonial dispossession and the plantation economy can join in multiple stars

• The decolonial is an affirmative refusal of white supremacy, anti-blackness, the colonial state and racialized political economy of displacement and violence that requires the dismantling of systems of oppression

• It recognises the interconnectedness of gendered, homophobic an ageist strands but sees diverse bodies as posing a threat to the settler colonial order in their bodily sovereignty

• Differently situated people renew and create cultures that have always been present, these stars form constellations to guide us towards decolonial futures

Daigle & Ramirez, 2019

• Race is both an experienced way of life and an analytical concept that conditions us into interpreting the world around us; it was developed as a theoretical system to expand European power and form a sense of European cultural superiority 

• Race can be seen as socially constructed rather than biologically determined, social constructs also determine sexist and homophobic attributions of strength, knowledge or civilisation to form a socially constructed world filled with socially constructed bodies

• Racialisation has historically produced power, territory and inequality to justify the actions of the white North against the Black south and east as well as the production of racial inequality in modern multicultural societies

• Through the system of race inequalities, poverty, degradation, denial of human rights and erasure of culture has been formed as a result

Kobayashi, 2016

• The #RMF movement erupted at the University of Cape Town in March 2015 and led to the formation of #RMF at the University of Oxford and similar movements across universities in the US

• The radical student movement centred around decolonising at the University of Cape Town by confronting questions of institutional racism, increasing access to education and reforming the Eurocentric curriculum

• In Oxford, the #RMF movement was established two months after the original protest, the students called for the removal of the Rhodes’ statue at Oriel College Oxford in an attempt to delink from Eurocentric theory and opt to frame their movement through a decolonial lens

• The #RMF campaign has provoked more public discussion and debate on the rights and wrongs of the British Empire than any number of books and articles

Ahmed, 2020

• The ‘decolonial kaleidoscope’ disrupts a western-centred world view and instead creates ‘a multi-coloured, compound and ever-changing kaleidoscopic understanding of the world’

• It recognises that there are multiple types of cultural geographies that should disrupt the western-centred world by bringing in diverse and varied cultural geographies, more than human elements and understanding that humans are not the only agents of cultural production

Radcliffe, 2022

• The Philippine rice terraces, established thousands of years ago, have enabled the conservation of more than 500 varieties of rice and have done so with very little soil erosion and optimal use of water resources

• The local people and their rice culture and traditions are the living ‘genebanks’ for the rice varieties and farming technologies in high altitudes 

• Some of the rice terraces have been inscribed as World Heritage Sites in recognition of their outstanding beauty and organically evolving cultural landscape

Nozawa et al., 2008

• There is much urbanisation occurring in the Global South, neoliberalism can be blamed for the creation of inequalities

• Slums are not all uniform and have varying characteristics

• The IMF and World Bank have ulterior motives and hidden disadvantages leading to urban poverty and slum growth, SAPs entrench this poverty in their restructuring of economies

• There are many risks associated with living in slums as well as working in the informal sector, these are especially challenging for women and children

Davis, 2006

• IMF structural adjustments as ‘the equivalent of a natural disaster’

• Definitive blame on neoliberal ideology championed by the Bretton Woods organisations

Balogun, 1995

• Problems with simplifications of African urban data viewed as ‘the more urban, the better’ to problems policy relevance

• Policy makers often misrepresent trends as they chose to ignore important bits of data

Potts, 2018

• There has been insufficient attention paid to adaptions occurring over the past 30 years in urban migration patterns, within the Sub-Saharan region Nigeria is particularly important to understand as it holds over 50% of West Africa’s total population

• Since 1952 all census results have been contested, Africapolis data in 2008 showed that nearly half of the smaller urban settlements had a lower urban population than the 1963 census, there are lower levels of urbanisation and slower increase for West Africa as a whole

• This is due to weak urban economies after 1980/90s SAPs, foreign competition and unreliable electricity

Potts, 2012

• There is much scope for improved research and information on urbanisation in Africa, this is important to improve the wellbeing of urban communities

• Many settlements grow without economies moving away from agricultural activities towards higher productivity sectors meaning incomes remain low and quality of life suffers, this reveals a problem in tying economic criteria to urbanisation

• Natural growth and rural-urban migration sees Nigeria’s urban population continue to grow when understanding wider social and environmental implications within demographic data

Turok, 2018

• Using more diverse sources of evidence shows urbanisation is not stalling in Nigeria, rural transformation and natural increases have been overlooked in the past and will contribute to Nigeria’s growing population in the future

• Declining mortality and high fertility see urban populations grow as well as rural ones that then become classed as urban

• Migration also occurs as people move to find employment, education, marriage, escape conflicts or environmental pressures etc.

• Demographic forces should be better considered in understanding Nigeria’s urban transition

Fox et al., 2018

• Definitions of the urban and city boundaries are not set to universal criteria meaning exaggeration is easy and comparisons are inaccurate

• There is a lack of census data particularly in SSA as they are expensive and international donors do not support them, this means UNDP relies on estimates and projections

• Claims of economic and population growth in SSA being unprecedented are not true, urban primary measures also lack real data

• Data limitations also understate the extent of depth of poverty in Asia and Africa as the application of a universal poverty line in inappropriate, there is also little data on housing and living conditions in informal settlements as well as GHG emissions of these urban areas

Satterthwaite, 2010

• Urbanisation is no longer rapid in Africa due to informal urban economies, SAPs and circular migration

• African economies are often trapped in viscous cycles due to the impact of SAPs and liberalised international trade being harmful due to a lack of competitive advantage

• Rates of urbanisation are important indicators of large economic structures and smaller economic livelihoods that provide essential context for policy making; we must move away from generalisations in the region

Potts, 2012

• Processes of urbanisation in SSA are occurring far more slowly than reported, false figures often come to be regarded as fact due to being constantly restates

• Data relies on erratic censuses, the more reliable Africapolis data set showed urbanisation was slowing in the region

• This can be attributed to SAPs, SSA being unable to compete in an era of economic liberalisation and circular migration as migrants enter and then leave towns due to economic insecurity and hardship

• The future for much of SSA is predominantly rural

Potts, 2012

• To make international comparison easier, the UN Statistical Commission endorsed the Degree of Urbanisation approach

• This provides an objective and data-driven approach to classifying urbanisation that can be applied globally

• It is simple, transparent, helps monitor the SDGs, captures agglomeration and is cost-effective

• It will remain comparable over space and time

Dijkstra et al., 2020

• The urban age thesis has been widely repeated and has become common sense, but it is flawed based on statistical artefacts and chaotic conceptions due to improper data and misunderstandings of the urban

• Planetary urbanisation is based on the idea that the urban is a theoretical category, a historical process and it cannot be bounded or enclosed

• It sees that the non-urban is never disconnected from the urban as it has become a planetary phenomenon which erodes urban/rural boundaries

• The urban continually produces new differentiations that must be explored with a new and appropriate vocabulary 

Brenner & Schmid, 2014

• Theories of the global, hierarchical or privileged cities are part of a Western colonial regime that ignores the experiences of diverse cities in the Global South; there should be a universal theory that unites rather than divides cities

• Instead of dividing cities into groupings, they should all be seen as ordinary cities

• Ordinary cities are formed of unique assemblages of wider processes and bring together vast networks in a diverse and complex manner

• This allows for greater capacity for creativity, change on international levels and allows cities to imagine their own futures without being predetermined in meaningless categories

Robinson, 2006

• The Chicago School is seen as the first example urban theory, the thinkers drew on Darwin’s arguments about competition and the process of natural selection

• Park saw the city as a mosaic of worlds where each group would find a habitat among equals, the groups would live in proximity but would be separated to form a peaceful coexistence

• Burgess created the concentric zone model whereby rings of higher status could be found as one travels further from the CBD due to invasion and succession of the inner city

• Often the Chicago School were criticised for focusing only on biological imperatives and ignoring human choice, unequal power and the role of politics; they saw inequality and segregation as inevitable and even necessary

• Wirth saw the urban as characterised by size, density and heterogeneity which would influence urban citizens to be anonymous and lack intimacy; although his theory is seen as a failure it moved away from the urban as a space to a social process

• The legacy of the Chicago School established a positivist urban tradition, saw that cities were social and established an interest in morphology, segregation and community

Harding & Blokland, 2014

• Early writing from theorists such as Simmel and Engels focused on the declining rural, the Chicago School derived ideas from eugenics and social Darwinism and the Frankfurt School carried forwards the legacy of Marx

• In the 1970s there was a shift to more critical urban theory focusing on weaknesses of capitalism, consumer culture and the loss of traditional social structures

• Postmodern urbanism saw world cities ranked in hierarchies, global cities emerged from this focusing on the relationships between cities by measuring flows

• A broader cultural turn now looks at feminist, critical Marxist, postcolonial and poststructural urban theory to understand immaterial and non-human actors or gender expression in forming experiences in complex cities

Jayne & Ward, 2017

• The term gentrification was coined over 50 years ago by Ruth Glass referring to the invasion of the middle class into the previously disinvested inner city working class neighbourhoods in London where they renovated old properties and displaced working class communities; this has since mutated beyond this and there is a need to understand the ‘comparative urbanism’ of the Global South

• Planetary gentrification refers to the process around the world today as we live in a ‘property movement’ where state led gentrification occurs in many rural and suburban spaces; land is continually appreciates to facilitate endless capital accumulation

• There are many new types such as slum gentrification, rental and creative; now the state leads gentrification agendas with the middle class taking on a new role

• There is much resistance against gentrification, there are few examples of success and these are all concentrated in the Global North

Lees, 2017

• Segregation can be ethnic or racial as well as social; these inequalities are produced at the intersections of people’s lives, their positionality inform where groups in the city can live and the extent to which they occupy separate sites as the city comes to reflect the social stratification of society; segregation is not voluntary

• Social segregation contrasts spatial segregation as it refers to the ways that people residing in mixed networks have separate social worlds, this is a study of what people do in the city rather than where they live

• Increasing immigration impacts segregation due to both socio-economic differences and prejudices/discrimination that constraints the mobility of individuals; it may not always be negative but can seen collective action rising from shared identities

• The assimilation thesis of integration of immigrants is criticised as societies are unwilling to define themselves as multicultural and it puts too much pressure on immigrants to adapt to their environments

Harding & Blokland, 2014

• Suburbanisation is a process where an increasing number of people move out of the city to its outskirts often to single family homes, in the US this has been seen as a middle-class white practice but in Europe includes much more of the working-class and has different characteristics 

• It is a class-based processes as it is historically a process of housing choices of the middle classes, it now has significance for more intersectional inequalities

• It is patriarchal as women become excluded from the city as they are trapped in the domestic suburbs, it is also racialised as building codes, processes and discrimination help the suburbs remain exclusively white gated communities

• Gated communities develop into areas of exclusive services for members in the inner city forming urban fear behind the fortified enclaves

• Suburbanisation is also a cultural approach as it forms new lifestyles and challenges traditional views on what living in the city is about

Harding & Blokland, 2014

• Gentrification comes with displacement of lower-status users of the space and directly affects inequalities by altering access to resources and creating political divisions

• Direct displacement occurs as people can no longer afford rent or repairs stop being done

• Indirect displacement is due to the pressure of displacement due to changes in commercial infrastructure, cultures and ways of behaving that are experiences as exclusionary 

• People forced to leave may be torn from rich social networks that they may not find again, this can hamper opportunities and in extremes form homelessness and overcrowding 

• There can be opportunities as some relocation programmes saw people more likely to have jobs and more likely to have children doing better in schools

• Gentrification assumes a well functioning community in the first place, ghettoisation shows this may not always be true

Harding & Blokland, 2014

• There are rising numbers of residential schemes in British and European cities upplying collectively consumed neighbourhood goods and services exclusively to households within the ‘gates’

• There is demand for less governmental control under the neoliberal regime, therefore local control rises

• Gated communities are able to be produced as services and amenities can be supplied most efficiently and effectively through small administrations allowing for greater security and product innovation within the communities 

• Therefore, the gated communities can be seen as a spatial expression of resources access related to neoliberalism and the ideology of the market

Webster, 2001

• Sao Paulo has become a city of walls with physical barriers everywhere, electronic devices and security men with the fortified enclaves physically isolated, turned away from the street and controlled by advanced security systems

• They rely on low-wage jobs and workers that the higher classes come to rely on in ambiguous relationships; isolation from the city is seen to create happiness and freedom through separation and total security 

• Social segregation is created in Sao Paulo by the use of physical dividers of walls and private security systems, being inward facing and aim to be independent worlds meaning they abandon the public life

• Private enclaves deny any of the basic elements constituting the modern experience of public life and openness

• LA is even more fragmented than Sao Paulo but less exaggerated in terms of security, domestic dependence and social movements but it does come ahead in economic transformation and urban dispersion

Calderia, 1996

• Urban informalities tend to occur outside of the formal mechanisms of state legislation, often it is used as a way to condemn residents as inferior but also is seen by some as a celebration of the agency and resilience of poor urban residents 

• Informalities occur within the practices of the urban-rich, Global South and Global North; not simply the global south

• Informalities are often seen as spatial, economic or political but these are highly interconnected as seen in Cato Crest, South Africa

• Urban theory has often seen informality as an opposition to the large scale, regulated formal sector and has historically been seen as a result of rapid urbanisation

• These characteristics are criticised for being simplistic and negative to justify inappropriate measures such as eviction and displacement; critics now develop ideas such as the ‘myth of marginality’, the solution of self-help housing and discuss the slum discourse

Lombard & Meth, 2017

• The ‘myth of marginality’ is often used to socially control the poor who are politically repressed through constructed opinions

• Contrary to myths suggesting the inferiority of the urban poor the Rio Favela dwellers were often socially well organised, had high aspirations for their children’s educations, were culturally optimistic and hard-working

Perlman, 1976

• In urban areas it is not possible to exist on subsistence agriculture or by foraging forcing urban residents to enter the labour market, make and sell goods or services though lack of an alternatives in order to gain the cash income essential for living in the city

• Often the work exists outside of formal conditions and is characterised by long hours in dangerous conditions

• The nature of informal work and incomes are shaped by the specific local contexts of a place, they vary from country to country and from household to household; there is a need for more research in order to more effectively advance urban poverty reduction

Mitlin & Satterthwaite, 2013

• Low-income urban dwellers in the Global South often have much worse health than middle and high income groups with high proportions dying at early ages often from preventable diseases or injuries

• These differentials are shaped by low quality housing, unhealthy living conditions and lack of access to healthcare services; health-related indicators often intersect with poverty-related indicators 

• Spatial differentials in health are useful for policy but often it is not specific enough to show differences in health within cities so healthcare policy cannot be adequately designed

Mitlin & Satterthwaite, 2013

• Borrowing from Robinson’s ‘ordinary cities’ concept, the concept of ‘ordinariness’ is a way of rejecting the absolute otherness of slums and stressing heterogeneity within and between neighbourhoods as well as the significance of comparative research 

• There is a need for alternative, less stigmatised terms; a new territorial ethnics, radical deconstruction and demystification of the ‘slum’ 

• These new conceptualisations should make aware of the ‘slum’ as a non-physical, spatially detached social construct that discredits marginalised people and diverts attention from precarious living conditions and ways of improving them

• Neighbourhoods should instead be seen as places with contextual characteristics, problems and demands only able to be understood through people-centred analysis; it should also deconstruct and decolonise dominant narratives of the ‘slum’

Beier, 2022

• Poverty has become increasingly concentrated in urban settlements due to economic cries and SAPs in the Third World having a disproportionate impact on the urban poor as well as rapid urbanisation growing urban populations fast

• Often poverty is defined using conventional measures looking at material deprivation which is useful for comparison but it restricts the number of criteria used to describe a multi-dimensional and evolving concept of urban poverty 

• There is often an external decision made about who is poor where people’s own conceptions differ from experts often attributing greater value to qualitative dimensions and the intersections with identities such as gender and ethnicity 

• Historically work has focused on urban-rural poverty but recent research has revealed much greater diversity in the extent and depth of poverty within the urban sector especially in the Third World 

• Urban poverty is unique from rural poverty and occurs in intersectional combinations of social, economic, political and environmental problems that must be tackled in integrated ways 

Wratten, 1995

• India’s urbanisation is seen as an urban crisis in two scenes, one of stalled and incomplete private developments such as Bangladesh airport and one of state violence by uprooting subsistence farmers on Calcutta’s peripheries 

• The form of urbanisation occurring is an idiom, a peculiar and particular process with the key feature of informality 

• The state engages in informality by unmapping and deregulating space in order to allow itself flexibility to alter land use and acquire land; informality also allows for insurgences against this but has little impact due to coming from the same structure it sees to overthrow

• Therefore, informality is not equal to poverty or illegality but is a deliberate absent of India’s urban planning used by both the state and private entities; this forms a fragmented urban landscape with failing plans brought about by the distinctive unregulated rationality determining urban planning

Roy, 2009

• Feminist analysis of the binaries of ‘here’ and ‘there’ or ‘us’ and ‘them’ created by 9/11 tragedy

• Human rights abuses ignored and images of Afghan civilians killed in the attacks omitted to form an audible silence

• The tragedy was both local and global but was produced as a national tragedy

Hyndman, 2003

• Fear cuts across the personal and societal, it has been globalised since the War on Terror

• There is a disconnection between fear and everyday life meaning they is a lack of understanding of how social politics can become entangled in the everyday to form emotional landscapes

• Marginality is strongly related to fear and often much hidden violence occurs in the private spheres

• Global and local fear interacts, an example being women’s bodies being caught up in international relations

Smith, 2008

• There are forced relations operating upon bodies as they are violated, exploited and abandoned

• Many everyday experiences manifest the position of disempowered people, these vulnerable bodies become a site for feminist exploration

• An example of Sara Smith’s work on marriage in Ladkha seeing the body become a geopolitical site

Dixon & Marston, 2011

• Feminist geopolitics as an approach connecting people, places and events across power and productions of inequalities

• There is a need to move away from the ‘Big Men’ of geopolitics and bring marginalised groups into the academic focus

• The creation of the nation-state is seen as the primary form of scale, feminist geopolitics favours the body as a site for deeper analysis

• There is a call for a greater understanding of emotional geopolitics, fear and risk

Massaro & Williams, 2013

• In the 1970s and 80s the WGSG began to publish texts increasing the visibility of women in Geography

• Women had been absent from Geography Departments, journals etc. seeing geography become based on a masculinist rationality that has been reproduced

• Feminist scholars critique masculinist argument and challenge oppression to allow for greater women’s participation

Nayak & Jeffery, 2012

• Geopolitics seen as a masculinist tradition dominated by the study of men and their actions

• Feminist geopolitics occurs at different scales within the private sphere and the body starting with those most impacted

• Women and others now challenge the language of geopolitics which has been viewed as universal but begin to rewrite narratives on the scale of the body and the home providing a new lens to make visible the everyday experiences of women

• There are challenges that feminist geopolitics still only focuses on mainstream women and even greater representation must be reached

Dittmer & Sharp, 2014

• Pan-Africanism sought to force alternative postcolonial worlds to Cold War binaries and see the Third World as a place in it’s own right with unique and vast culture

• Subaltern states have been silenced by the international politics of the US and Europe, they must be heard and understood through an appropriate lens

• Tanzania is an example of advocating for Pan-Africanism with Nyerere pressing for Third World solidarity

Sharp, 2013

• Feminist geography explores unequal relations and understands that geographical knowledge is often gendered and baed on masculine assumptions

• In the 1980s and 90s black feminists spoke of ‘double discrimination’ living in racialised and patriarchal societies, they criticised feminist movements for being insensitive to the differential experiences of women

• Women’s activism includes the private sphere and is often associated with peace movements

Painter & Jeffery, 2012

• Subaltern geopolitics attempts to offer alternatives to dominant critical geopolitics by giving power to marginalised states

• There is little consideration of the politics of representation on the margins with huge parts of the population and global society ignored when their experiences should count the most

• Identifies and connections should be recognised to make visible the margins and provide access to formal circuits of power

• Seeks to build a world where everyone’s lives count and no bodies are seen as more privileged than others

Sharp, 2011

• In the US Empire is very important and is often compared to the British Empire with both being seen as rooted in Mackinder’s ideas and expressions

• Geopolitics centres around 4 key thinkers: Mahan on sea-power, Ratzel on living space, Mackinder on land-power and the Heartland and Kjellen on blocs of states

• In US and Russian strategists Mackinder’s ideas of controlling resources and the wider world have been seen in a revival of geopolitics

• Mackinder’s ideas have resonated in a number of historical movements such as Nazi based strategies, post WW2 US strategies and now Russian and US containment ideas

• His ideas provide a powerful basis for the use of force and projection of this as well as considering the same physical and geographical areas that are important today

• His work could be challenged by progressive geopolitics in the future

Kearns, 2009

• In 1996 ‘Critical Geopolitics’ was published with the task of revisioning global politics to critique engagements across geography, international relations and post-colonial studies; now the richness of critique is what makes it a thriving venture

• There is more to be done in terms of feminist geopolitics to ensure it is engaged not only on the scale of the body, but also the big ideas of geopolitics

• There should also be a rewilding of geopolitics to account for power power and space intersect with animal and non-human life as well as understanding the views of BAME, female and LGBTQ+ scholars to make critical geopolitics more engaged and responsive 

• The materialist turn should also be understood and how a more than human approach may change critical geopolitics and how it understands the limits to performativity and power

Koopman et al., 2021

• There is a need to reassess the value of language as the political importance of it seems to be being lost in the constant development of new disciplines such as feminist and decolonial geopolitics that put language in the background of their analysis 

• Language and language practices make realities, it is a broad practice and a process that came to be considered in greater depth in the wake of the Cold War

• There are arguments for exploring only language being inadequate, but in reality it is embodied, communicative and acted so deserves attention; this is being seen in the ‘new Cold War’ language conjuring emotions and tangible actions as well as used as click-bait

• New attempts to diversify critical geopolitics will need to extent to language and language practices, especially in de-colonial and new cyber geopolitics

• Words are not passive representations but active

Medby, 2020

• The Orient was almost a European invention, it is not a fact of nature and is not merely there but it is based on a history of thought, imagery and vocabulary drawing from a style of thought based on an ontological separation between the Orient and the Occident that is recreated in works of culture ever since

• The ideas, culture and history of the Orient cannot be seriously understood without understanding the power operations behind it, the relationship between the Orient and the Occident is one of domination and hegemony that justified ruling, dominating and restructuring from the West

• The structure of the Orient is nothing more than a structure of lies mainly produced by the British and French cultural enterprise over India and the Bible lands in their own interests

Said, 1979

• A more holistic and critical view of geopolitics sees that the US geopolitics in Central America reflects the state’s attempt to arrest declining global hegemony 

• The use of language and binaries set up a Soviet-US struggle and the domino theory reframed the unrest in El Salvador as an ideological struggle

• This sees that economic self-interest and state authority are not the key geopolitical interests, but instead the culture of the American way of life and hegemony framed Reagan’s geopolitics in Central America seeing defense spending increase and traditional boundaries strengthened

• Attempting to continue domination and maintain credibility were key to Reagan’s policy

O Tuathail, 1986

• Calls for a challenge to the pre-given and taken for granted space and instead investigate the politics behind geopolitics 

• This draws on the Foucauldian premise of discourse through which political actors shape geopolitical ideas through language, images and narratives communicating geopolitical understandings; geopolitics is seen as a spectacle

• It seems to break away from the state-centric view of geopolitics to challenge categorisations, cultural creations and imbedded norms of Western thought concerning gender, race and identity 

• Sees that geopolitics is not a formal school of thought but a practice enacted by wider intellectuals of statecraft in the everyday conduction of foreign policy 

• There is also an appreciation of popular culture and the everyday contributing to discourses and influencing how people see and engage with geopolitical issues

O Tauthail, 1996

• Recent work in political and cultural geography foreground the role of affect in the performative enactment of space and spacing; film can be seen as an affective assemblage through which political sensibilities emerge and are amplified

• The relation between cinema and enactments of geopolitical interventions must be understood in the way one reproduces or subverts the discursive framed codes and scripts but also in terms of the amplification and anchoring of particular effects though tactics and techniques 

• An example is seen in the geopolitical logics of intervention implicated in the US involvement in Somalia in 1993 and its depiction in ‘Black Hawk Down’

Carter & McCormack, 2006

• Top Gun Maverick reflects anxiety over the US’ relative decline in the face of China’s high tech military upsurge and aired with great geopolitical timing in the same week Biden met with several heads of state to reassure them of the US’ commitment to their regions

• This is seen in Cruise obviously being older as well as a sense of nostalgia to the US’ old military prowess with older pilots flying traditional planes

• In the film, students face an enemy with a more advanced ‘fifth-generation’ aircraft but China is never named and potentially offensive material is removed as the film is fearful of naming their enemy 

• The aging male lead and old-fashioned kit gives a clear sense of vulnerability

Crabtree, 2022

• Decolonial theory acts as an intervention in time and space as it deconstructs the idea of a postcolonial seen as the end of colonialism, but this still enforces hegemonic relations

• Colonial power/knowledge dynamics remain embedded in scholarly work so there is a need to reconfigure knowledge production; there is a need to think from the colonial difference and speak from the underside

• The postcolonial is flawed as it relies on theoretical framing and binary thinking that perpetuate asymmetric geopolitics of knowledge, the decolonial makes visible the violence of this scholarism and attempts to think outside the western canon

• This is needed for example in indigenous political geographies and can be combined with feminist geopolitics to considered the embodied experience of those marginalised

Naylor et al., 2018

• Halford Mackinder incorporated social Darwinism as he saw the world as a stage for competition between races and nations; he suggested that the resources, railways and remoteness of the Russian heartland would pose a threat to powerful states

• Mackinder believed that who ruled the heartland would rule the world, showing geography’s connection to empire; he supported British imperialism

• Raztel incorporated Darwin’s theory into the formation of political communities, he suggested the state was a living organism and it’s imperative for living space would justify stronger states to expand territorially into new areas

• Ellen Churchill Semple saw the environment as determining human behaviour and this would influence social, cultural and religious developments; she often resorted to racist tendencies as she saw that entire populations would be morally, spiritually or culturally inferior due to their environments 

• Petr Kroptin argued against imperialism seeing cooperation more important than competition to improve global living conditions

Nayak & Jeffery, 2012

• W.E.B Du Bois was one of the most important intellectuals and activists of the C20th, he spoke about the intersections of race, empire and White supremacy with his activism making the case for greater engagement with decolonial geopolitics

• The colour line showed that fundamental elements of world politics were not states or territory, but race, imperialism and structures of White supremacy seeing that events such as WW1 must be understood in relation to race

• He also advocated for transnational solidarity among the subaltern promoting Pan-Africanism, organising conferences and promoting Afro-Asian solidarity to form alliances across social movements and national borders

• Decolonial geopolitics develops from this as a worldmaking project not just a critique but a reimagining of a new structure of the world; this relates to subalter and postcolonial geopolitics

Moore & Joudah, 2022

• Some states now built their own alternative non-violent securities which make connections across difference and distance focusing on the safety of bodies and grounding geopolitics in everyday life

• Anti-geopolitics often focuses on resistance to hegemonic geopolitics rather than being an effort to make something new, feminist geopolitics therefore takes this and puts together new and broader definitions for security for more bodies in more places

• Alter-geopolitics is a way of extending the concepts of anti and feminist geopolitics and it reminds us to look at marginalised, private and everyday experiences that we may not think of as geopolitics; this offers much in terms of how we think about security

Koopman, 2011