Geogr a Sumpmer 2011h€¦ · Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal 101 Anna Krzywoszynska...

AN IN TERNAT ION AL JO UR N AL

GeographySummer 2011 Vol 96 Part 2

In this issue:

• Thirdspace and thecontemporary geographycurriculum

• Football, place andmigration

• Ecotourism in AmazonianPeru

Geography Vol 96 Part 2 Summer 2011 © Geography 2011

Geography Editorial PolicyGeography aims to re-energise the subject at all levels of education by stimulating dialogue anddebate about the essential character and contribution of the subject. Articles submitted shouldbe relevant to geographers and educationalists in schools, colleges and universities worldwideand to those involved in teaching, curriculum development, advanced study and research.

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Geography Vol 96 Part 2 Summer 2011© Geography 2011

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Contents

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Contents

Editorial: A world of difference 58Peter Jackson for the Editorial Collective

The living city: Thirdspace and the contemporary geography curriculum 60Richard Bustin

The origins and development of geography fieldwork in British schools 69Victoria Ann Cook

Ecotourism in Amazonian Peru: uniting tourism,conservation and community development 75Jennifer L. Hill and Ross A. Hill

Football, place and migration: foreign footballers in the English Premier League 86David Storey

Challenging AssumptionsWake up and smell the masala: contested realities in urban India 95Carl Lee

Spotlight on ... Waste: Uncovering the global food scandal 101Anna Krzywoszynska

Obituary: Rex Ashley Walford 105Michael Morrish

Reviews 108Edited by Hedley Knibbs

Forthcoming in Geography• Mega-event security: the legacies of Euro 2008• Reflections on global studies• The ideology of Teaching Geography


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Editorial

Editorial: A world ofdifference

Peter Jackson, for theEditorial CollectiveAs geographers we aim to make sense of thediversity of the world around us while also trying to‘make a difference’ to those we teach and forwhom we write. Rex Walford, who died earlier thisyear and whose obituary we carry in this issue,used a similar phrase in the subtitle of his study ofthe last 150 years of geography teaching in Britishschools which, he claimed, set itself the task of‘making a world of difference’ (Walford, 2001).Adequately recognising and dealing equitably withdifference has become a key issue of our times.While sociologists like Stuart Hall have asked ‘Howare we to make some sort of common life togetherwithout retreating into warring tribes?’ (Hall, 2007)it is we, as geographers, who often feel we havesome special responsibility for responding to thechallenges of ‘living with difference’.

A good case can be made for treating difference asone of geography’s keywords alongside conceptslike space and place, scale and interdependence.The National Curriculum refers to ‘diversity’ ratherthan difference as one of the key concepts at keystage 3 where geographers are charged withpromoting ‘cultural understanding and diversity’(QCA, 2007). According to the QCA, our job is toteach students to appreciate ‘the differences andsimilarities between people, places, environmentsand cultures [in order] to inform theirunderstanding of societies and economies’ (QCA,2007, p. 103). Our students should also learn toappreciate ‘how people’s values and attitudesdiffer and may influence social, environmental,economic and political issues [while] developing

their own values and attitudes about such issues’(QCA, 2007, p. 103).

Important though these aims are, I would arguethat understanding cultural diversity is not quitethe same as confronting the challenges ofdifference. In an article in this journal nearly tenyears ago, I attempted to distinguish between aliberal model of multiculturalism and a morecritical version; the former emphasising thecelebration of diversity (where pre-existing‘cultures’ come into contact with one another), thelatter recognising cultural differences as activelyproduced through specific encounters, based ondistinct historical experiences and establishedhierarchies of power (Jackson, 2002). The currentPrime Minister’s recent assertions about the‘failure’ of state multiculturalism in Britain (asreported on the BBC News, 5 February 2011) onlyserve to strengthen my commitment to this criticalmodel of ‘living with difference’. David Camerondistinguished between the ‘passive tolerance’ ofcultural diversity, which he felt had contributed tothe undermining of national security, and a ‘moreactive, muscular liberalism’ with which it could bedefended. But there are many other ways of facingup to a world of difference and I hope that we, asgeographers, will help to articulate them.

What, then, do the articles in this issue say aboutthe challenges and opportunities that face us on aglobal, national and local level? At first glance, theymay appear to demonstrate little beyond thediscipline’s inherent diversity. But, examined moreclosely, I think they reveal much more about thechallenges of living with difference (its promisesand threats) including some indications of howsuch differences should be studied and howconflicting forces might be resolved.

In the first article, Richard Bustin reports on athree-year action research project at his school inEssex, using Ed Soja’s concept of ‘Thirdspace’ toinvestigate the political and moral geographies ofillicit drug users. Drawing on a range of sources,including Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting (basedon Irving Welsh’s novel), Bustin contrasts the‘Firstspace’ of the city’s built form with the


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Editorial‘Secondspace’ of imagined or representationalspace. He uses the idea of ‘Thirdspace’ totranscend the conceptual binary between real andimagined spaces. In their efforts to engage withthese different experiential and representationalspaces, Bustin argues, students are encouraged tostruggle with ideas, arguments and uncertainties,making sense of their own lives and experiencesalongside those of disadvantaged inner-cityresidents (as depicted in Welsh’s novel and Boyle’sfilm). This is an exciting pedagogical experiment inwhich students develop their geographicalimaginations and creativity in the context of aschool curriculum that Bustin describes as ‘stuckin a time warp’.

In the second article, Victoria Cook provides ahistorical perspective on the development ofgeographical fieldwork in British schools,examining how fieldwork came to assume itscurrent iconic status where any criticism of itsvalue and purpose can be interpreted as anassault on the very core of the subject. Cookshows how geography’s fieldwork agenda has beenshaped by forces from inside and outside thediscipline. Inspired by the historiographical impulseof authors like Rex Walford, Cook provides a criticalaccount of fieldwork’s contested history, includinga valuable perspective on current initiatives suchas Young People’s Geographies.

The following article by Jennifer and Ross Hillreflects on the dilemmas of a different kind of‘fieldwork’, examining the development ofecotourism in Latin America. Taking the example ofPeru, their article probes the promise ofecotourism to reconcile a range of potentiallyconflicting forces: international tourism,environmental conservation and local communitydevelopment. While conscious of possible tensionsbetween conservation interests and locallivelihoods, the authors are cautiously optimisticabout the future prospects of ecotourism inAmazonian Peru provided that these potentiallyconflicting forces are effectively managed.

The next article examines the geography of sport,a topic of perennial interest to students but onewhich, despite their raw enthusiasm, they oftenfind challenging. David Storey examines thedislocation of sport and place through thecommercialisation and internationalisation ofBritish football, analysing the geographical origins

and migration flows of foreign footballers in theEnglish Premier League. While the transnationalmigration of players has undoubtedly increased inrecent years, Storey suggests that its geographicalextent is restricted by the social networks ofplayers, agents and managers. Storey concludesthat the internationalisation of football might leadBritish fans and viewers to become more insular orcould become a force for positive social change.

We round off the issue with our usual ‘ChallengingAssumptions’ and ‘Spotlight on…’ features. In avivid essay, Carl Lee questions whether India’seconomic liberalisation has led to a more just andequal society, as claimed in Thomas Freidman’stechnologically-driven ‘flat world’ hypothesis.Focusing on the experience of Bengaluru (formerlyknown as Bangalore), a major centre for researchand development in new technologies, Lee showshow rampant inequalities persist and how they arebeing revealed through the innovative cartographicmethods of local researchers and activists such asthe Bangalore Patrol. Finally, Anna Krzywoszynskareviews Tristam Stuart’s recent book on the ‘globalscandal’ of food waste, exploring the socio-structural forces that underpin our apparentlyprofligate attitude to food.

Mike Morrish’s obituary of Rex Walford provides afitting conclusion to this issue, highlighting theworld of difference that can be made through asingle life, powerfully devoted to the advancementof geographical thought and teaching.

ReferencesHall, S. (2007) ‘Living with difference: Stuart Hall in

conversation with Bill Schwarz’, Soundings, 37, pp.148–58.

Jackson, P. (2002) ‘Geographies of diversity anddifference’, Geography, 87, pp. 316–23.

QCA (2007) Geography: Programme of study for key stage3 and attainment targets. Available online athttp://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/uploads/QCA-07-3334-pGeography3_tcm8-400.pdf (last accessed 4 April2011).

Walford, R. (2001) Geography in British Schools, 1850–2000: Making a world of difference. London: WoburnPress.


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The living city:Thirdspace andthecontemporarygeographycurriculum

The living city:Thirdspace and thecontemporarygeographycurriculum

Richard Bustin

ABSTRACT: With the widening of the national

curriculum, geography teachers in secondary

schools can now develop their own curricula around

a series of ‘key concepts’. This article describes how

ideas from academic geography can be used to

inspire and motivate students in secondary schools.

Here, Soja’s (1996, 2000) concept of ‘Thirdspace’

forms the basis of classroom-based activities for

year 10 (14–15 year old) students. It focuses on

perceptions of urban space which are conveyed

through the ‘Thirdspace’ of illicit drug users in

Edinburgh. The article indicates how those concepts

and ideological traditions that underlie geography

curriculum in schools, including the need to employ

the ‘grammar’ of geography, have helped to inform

the classroom-based action research described

here. It also argues that introducing approaches

such as Thirdspace in school geography may help to

overcome the perceived irrelevancy of the subject by

students and thus address the decline in the

number taking geography at GCSE and A-level.

IntroductionThe Geography National Curriculum (QCDA, 2009)in England and Wales has recently undergone aradical change, allowing teachers to develop theirown curricula for the first time in decades. Thesechanges have, once again, reignited the debateover what we should be teaching school studentsin geography lessons; as Lambert observes,‘whenever we ask ourselves what education (orschool) is for, we inevitably get into curriculumdebates about what we select, or elect, to teachyoung people’ (2008, p. 207). Many commentatorsfeel school geography should be about imparting a‘body of academic knowledge’ from one generationto the next (e.g. Whelan, 2007) with little concernabout entering into any moral or politicaldiscussions with students, while others (e.g.Beneker et al., 2007) believe that a contemporarygeography curriculum should be grounded in thelife worlds of students as well as drawing on ideasdeveloped in the academic discipline.

As a school subject geography has been branded‘boring’ and ‘irrelevant’ by the school’sinspectorate, the Office for Standards in Education(Ofsted, 2008). Ofsted’s criticism has coincidedwith a decline in students opting to take geographyat GCSE from 302,298 in 1996 to 196,018 in2009, and at A-level from 46,680 in 1992 to32,227 in 2009 (RGS-IBG, 2009). At the sametime, there has been a gradual divergence of thesubject as taught in schools and as developed inuniversities. School geography, it could be argued,is stuck in a time warp, the content of which issimilar to the ‘new geography’ of the 1960s ratherthan some of the latest developments in highereducation (e.g. see Kent, 2000). Indeed, Goudiewas the first to identify the ‘great divide’ betweenschool and university geography, describing it as, ‘achasm’ (1993, p. 338). As Lambert argues, ‘tocontinue bolstering what is essentially a 19th-century curriculum in which selected knowledge ispackaged and “delivered” will not serve wellcitizens of the 21st century’ (1999, p. 11).


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Furthermore, Fein warns, ‘without engagement withacademic geography, school geography “is indanger of becoming epistemologically and sociallyirrelevant”’ (quoted in Firth and Biddulph, 2008).

However, from September 2008 and with thechanges implemented by QCDA (2009), teachersregained control of the curriculum. The result isthat ‘there is now for the first time in a generation,opportunity and encouragement for teachers ofgeography to think about what they are doing inconceptual terms’ (Lambert, 2008, p. 209). The‘curriculum makers’ – teachers and heads ofdepartments in schools – now have the opportunityto update and redesign the geography curriculumto make it relevant and contemporary to thestudents they teach. Although new classroomtechnologies are being developed, includingdevelopments in geographical informationsystems, all too often such technologies are beingused to deliver outdated knowledge in acontemporary fashion, rather than tackling theoutdated curriculum in the first place. Change isneeded, and, as Beneker et al. argue:‘if material currently being developed at universitylevel might be more helpful to children in making

sense of the world than some of the more

traditional elements of ... geography, is it fair to

deprive current students of this material as we wait

for it to somehow filter down?’ (2007, p. 264).Thus, this article presents the outcomes of athree-year classroom-based action research project

which introduces concepts from the academicdiscipline – namely Thirdspace (Soja, 1996, 2000)– to secondary geography students.

ThirdspaceThe concept of ‘Thirdspace’ was developed byurban geographer and sociologist Ed Soja (1996,2000). Intended for use with undergraduatestudents, Thirdspace combines three interactingurban ‘spaces’:

• Firstspace is the ‘real’ space – the urban builtform of physical buildings that can be mappedand seen.

• Secondspace is the ‘imagined’representational space – i.e. how the space isperceived, seen and argued over. In urbansettings this would be evident through, e.g. therole of marketing and redevelopment projects.

• Thirdspace takes this thinking further – itcombines First and Second space to createwhat Soja describes as, ‘a fully lived space, asimultaneously real-and-imagined, actual-and-virtual locus of structured individuality andcollective experience and agency’ (2000, p. 11).

As Soja (2000) continues,‘[Thirdspace is] a product of a “thirding” of the

spatial imagination, the creation of another

mode of thinking about space that draws upon

the material and mental spaces of the traditional

dualism (of First and Second spaces) but

extends well beyond them in scope, substance

The Meadows, Edinburgh.Photo: Julian Stallabras/Flickr. Reproduced underCreative Commons licence2.0.


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and meaning. Simultaneously real and imagined

and more … the exploration of Thirdspace can

be described and inscribed in journeys to “real-

and-imagined” places’ (2000, p. 11).

Thirdspace then is the experience of life in theFirstspace mediated through Secondspaceexpectations. Thirdspace traditionally uses thelived experience of disadvantaged individuals andgroups in urban society, which ‘is created by thosewho reclaim these real and symbolic spaces ofoppression, and make them into something else’(Smith, 2005, p. 29). The context chosen for thisresearch is the experiences of illicit drug users inEdinburgh because their ‘lived space’ wasperceived as providing a way to approach urbangeography from a humanist perspective, and onewhich students could engage with.

Toward a modern schoolcurriculumDesigning engaging and challenging geography forschool students is difficult, especially in view ofthe fact that what constitutes ‘geography’ is stillunder debate. In an attempt to set parameters forthe subject, a number of geographers haveproposed a set of ‘key concepts’ which they claimunderlie the subject (Table 1); and it is thosesuggested by QCA which teachers now have todesign their curriculum around.

No matter how the underlying concepts ofgeography are organised, notions of ‘space’ and‘place’ appear readily, and it is these thatThirdspace helps to address. Ideas around ‘place’and ‘space’ have changed through time, which hashad important repercussions for school geography.The move from ‘the idiographic regional approach’to new ‘quantitative’ geography of the 1970s, ‘withits emphasis on theoretical models, conceptualframeworks and quantitative techniques wasinfluencing a new generation of teachers ... within10 years a paradigm shift had occurred in terms ofchanged syllabuses and textbooks in the directionof the “new geography”’ (Kent, 2000, p. 114).What followed in human geography was a ‘culturalturn … in which the traditional belief in objectiveknowledge has given way to more sceptical andcritical understandings of the relationship betweenpower and knowledge’ (Jackson, 2000, p. 5). Thiswas accompanied by a postmodern, cultural turn ofwhich Thirdspace forms a part. A similar‘curriculum shift’ to accommodate some of themore recent thinking in human geography has yetto occur in schools. This lack of curriculumdevelopment has had implications for the waystudents experience geography in the classroom.As Rawding points out:

‘locations are seen as settings for the delivery

of national curriculum themes ... this

undoubtedly simplifies and sterilises the study

of place, often resulting in an arid narrative

and uninspiring factual accumulation ... with no

Photo:

Table 1: Key concepts ingeography, 1998–2007.Source: Taylor, 2009.

Leat (1998)Cause and effectClassificationDecision makingDevelopmentInequalityLocationPlanningSystems

Holloway et al. (2003)Landscape and environmentPhysical systemsPlaceScaleSocial formationsSpaceTime

Geography Advisors’ andInspectors’ Network (2002)BiasCausationChangeConflictDevelopmentDistributionEnvironmentFutures

Jackson (2006)Proximity and distanceRelational thinkingScale and connectionSpace and place

Rowley and Lewis (2003)Describing and classifyingDiversity and wildernessPatterns and boundariesPlacesMaps and communicationSacredness and beauty

UK 2008 Key Stage 3Curriculum (QCA, 2007)Cultural understanding anddiversityEnvironmental interaction andsustainable developmentInterdependencePhysical and human processesPlaceScaleSpace

InequalityInterdependenceLandscapeLocationPerceptionRegionScaleUncertainty


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coherent theoretical or philosophical

underpinnings’ (2007, p. 22).

In schools, a recent study (Beneker et al., 2007)identified six key areas of urban geography thatteachers felt should be explored with lowersecondary students. These are: planning andmanagement, urban change, social issues, urbanstructure, world contrasts, and sustainability.Contrast this with with a similar list produced byacademics, who identified ‘political, economic andsocio-cultural dimensions of cities … globalisation,neo liberalism and post industrial society’(Beneker et al., pp. 260–1) as areas of explorationfor lower secondary students and one begins tounderstand the divide between school anduniversity geography.

In order to address this divide, Rawdingencourages school teachers to, ‘consider place asan active process ... putting place at the centre ofstudy, [which] enables both teacher and learner todevelop deeper insights into the complex anddiverse attributes of place’ (2007, p. 22). It wasthis notion that led to the research outlined here.

Thirdspace in theclassroom: illicit druguse in EdinburghThe process of taking an idea from academicgeography and presenting it to students as ameaningful learning exercise is not straightforward.As Morgan and Lambert argue ‘lesson planning isnot just a technical activity, but an intellectualactivity’ (quoted in Brooks, 2006, p. 75). Engagingwith the lives of marginalised people can bringeducational benefits to students of urbangeography. Much of the discussion around urbandecline and rejuvenation focuses on people, and aThirdspace approach allows students to investigatethe interaction between marginalised people andthe built form itself. While many urbandevelopment projects simply look at providing morejobs or better housing, students who useThirdspace to study an area gain a much moreholistic understanding about the nature of thesocial problems in an area and therefore obtain abetter informed and more critical stance onregeneration projects. Thus, Thirdspace can be apowerful conceptual tool to help students engagewith the urban environment.

The research was carried out with year 10 GCSEstudents (14–15 year olds) studying urban decay.The ‘traditional’ element of the course – thestructure of cities in the form of urban modeling –formed the start of the unit. In effect, the studentshad already looked at the Firstspace of cities. Thesequence of lessons were aimed specifically atgetting them out of the habit of looking at urbanproblems from a purely economic perspective andto consider some of the social reasons why anarea may become rundown and why it may remainso. The Thirdspace of illicit drug use in Edinburghactivity was designed for students to engage withlived space concepts in an environment in whichthe interacting spaces (First and Second) are lesswell defined and thus overlap. Edinburgh as anurban environment is easily identifiable to students– its structure and layout is similar to many otherUK cities. Furthermore, the focus on drug abusersmay also hold resonance with some students – asParker et al. have observed, ‘when we find that halfthis generation has tried an illicit drug by the endof their adolescence and perhaps a quarter arefairly regular “recreational” drug users, we can nolonger use pathologising explanations’ (1998, p. 1).The majority of the ‘voice’ of the drug users comesfrom the novel and film Trainspotting (Welsh, 1993;Boyle, 1996). This resources was chosen becauseit depicts the lives of a group of drug abusers inEdinburgh and, as Hemingway points out,

Trainspotting brings into view the geographiesof the street and provides fertile ground for

teachers and students to explore the social

relations and interconnectedness of mundane

urban environments (2006, p. 326).

Showing extracts from the film was designed toinspire and enthuse the students as well as toprovide an insight into the protagonists’ livedexperience. Its use, however, is problematic: thefilm is rated ‘18’, contains ‘strong’ languagethroughout and there are potential copyright issuesaround showing media clips in the classroom.Therefore, the suitability of screening Trainspottingneeds to be considered carefully; teachers mayelect to read a passage from the novel (Welsh,1993). During this research, and after consultationwith senior managers at the school, it was decidedto stream the first two and a half minutes of thefilm from a freely-available video-sharing website.The students were deemed sufficiently mature andresponsible to watch the extract because it was for‘educational purposes’; furthermore, most of the



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students had already seen the whole filmthemselves at home. The clip chosen is iconic inBritish cinematography: it follows the drug addictsas they are being chased through the streets ofEdinburgh. While the eloquent ‘choose life’monologue includes a constant stream ofexpletives, it articulates the frustrations thecharacters are feeling at that time and in thatplace and, as such, provides a rich opportunity toexplore these ideas with the students.

After the film clip, a PowerPoint presentation wasused to introduce the students to the variety ofFirst- and Second-spaces in Edinburgh. Aworksheet was provided to scaffold students’thinking and help them to separate out theinteracting spaces. This enabled them to obtain aclear idea of the first two spaces before linkingthem in Thirdspace. Two students’ responses to

the final enquiry question ‘What is the livedexperience of drug addicts in Edinburgh?’ areshown in Figure 1.

These extracts exemplify how Thirdspace can beintegrated into students’ work. Both studentsreadily and confidently use the terms ‘Firstspace’and ‘Secondspace’ in the correct context andindicate an understanding of Thirdspace. It alsoprovides evidence of high order thinking accordingto Bloom’s taxonomy (as described in Hill andMcGaw, 1981). Here, the students are in the‘evaluation stage’, using the interacting spacesfrom the film/novel and combining them. Thestudents’ use of phrases such as ‘due to’ and thereasoning given for each of their statementspushed this work into the higher order thinking.

Nevertheless, a potential drawback of engagingwith the issues of drug abuse and spaces of crimeis the notion of stereotyping of both places andbehaviour. In tackling these issues with students, itis important to clarify that not all drug users arepoor and nor do all muggings in Edinburgh takeplace in Princes Street. An extension activitydesigned to address this concern is to change theperspective of the Thirdspace. Students can lookat the lived space of Edinburgh through theexperience of other local residents: young people,the elderly, those with a disability, the unemployed,and so on. Will each view the same areas of thecity in different ways? Exploring the variety ofviewpoints with students may start to break downsome of the set ideas and stereotypes aboutthose particular places.

In order to extend their understanding studentscan be encouraged to explore the elements of theThirdspace of their own lives. They can investigatehow places they see and use everyday could havedifferent meanings for other people. This approachcould form part of some innovative fieldwork.

DiscussionAny attempt to enliven the teaching of geography insecondary schools by incorporating ideas from theacademic discipline in the classroom, needscareful handling. As Morgan argues, ‘there arepotential problems when ideas from culturalgeography are picked up and translated intoclassroom activities without a clear understandingof the intellectual contexts in which they areimplemented’ (2008, p. 22). It is these contexts

Figure 1: Two year 10students’ responses tothe enquiry question‘What is the livedexperience of drugaddicts in Edinburgh?’

Drug addicts in Edinburgh would live in deprivedareas (1st space) such as Granton, as it ischeap. There would also be affiliations (2ndspace) with the drug culture, with drug dealersand fellow addicts based in the area. Thereputation of areas such as Prince’s Street (2ndspace) as places where tourists converge, andflaunt wealth, may attract drug addicts in searchof potential targets to rob to feed their habit.Drug addicts may travel to areas such as RoseStreet, which has a reputation for pubs andprostitutes (2nd space). Drug addicts may ‘hangaround’ parks (1st space) as they perceivethese to be areas of leisure (2nd space). Whilstin possession of drugs, addicts may be bothaware of, and fearful of H.M.P. Staughton, incase they are caught.

The drug addict would live in Granton, due to itssecondspace reputation of being run down, andwould get his money from mugging people inPrince’s Street and during the EdinburghFestival, because of their secondspacereputation of being busy, and from the renownednumber of tourists, many of which will havemoney. The local hospitals would act as a safetynet, as they are used to treating patients withdrug overdoses, and would probably hang outand deal or take drugs in The Meadows, with asecondspace reputation of being an open areawith not too many people about. However, hewould be put off crime by the local firstspaceH.M. Prison Saughton, knowing he would bepunished.



that are picked up when observing lessons, asBrooks indicates when she asks her traineeteachers: ‘what sort of geographical knowledge isbeing studied in this lesson?’ (2006, p. 78).

This elementary question is actually very difficult toanswer and requires a sound understanding of thecurriculum ideologies which underpin the way theway the subject is taught. In order to illustrate this,Table 2 outlines some of the major ideologicaltraditions and how they have impacted on schoolgeography in England.Nevertheless, engaging with Thirdspace is not justabout updating the content of geography lessons;it is about altering the ideology through whichurban space is studied. It could be argued that

school geography, with its emphasis on ‘scientificmethods, theories and techniques’ (Rawling, 2000,p. 212), is still in the most part approached from a‘liberal humanist’ tradition. When ‘livedexperience’ is placed at the heart of the study, asThirdspace encourages, there is a shift in ideologyto ‘progressive educational’ or even a‘reconstructionist’ viewpoint. This ‘cultural turn’ inschool geography, which is a slow and ongoingprocess to which this research adds, can be alliedto what Moore (1999) dubbed ‘New Education’ andwhich ‘has been influenced by perspectives fromcultural studies and postmodernism’ (Morgan,2000, p. 283). It bridges the gap between place inschool geography and place in the academicdiscipline, and goes some way to preparing

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Ideological tradition

Utilitarian/informational

Cultural restorationism(as promoted by theNew Right in Englishpolicy making in the1980s and 1990s)

Liberal humanist (alsocalled classicalhumanist)

Progressiveeducational (also calledchild-centred)

Reconstructionist (alsocalled radical)

Vocational or industrialtrainer (Note: in someways this cuts acrossall the other traditions)

Impact on school geography in England

Locational knowledge (‘capes and bays’), map skills anduseful information about natural resources, travel routes,economic products. Prevalent in the 19th century but re-emerged strongly in the 1991 national curriculum.

Aspects of locational, regional and economic geographyrelated to Britain’s early 20th-century empire and tradinglinks. School geography in the 20th century. Re-emergedin 1991 national curriculum giving a view of a relativelyunchanging world.

The development of geography as an academic disciplinein the 20th century and resulting higher status. Stresson concepts, scientific methods, theories andquantitative techniques. Transferred to schools via the‘new geography’ of the 1960s and 70s and prevalent inGCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels.

Emphasis on enquiry, active learning and thedevelopment of skills (e.g. communication), attitudes(e.g. respect for others) and values (e.g. care for theenvironment) through geography. Emphasised in child-centred primary education in 1960s and 70s and inSchools Council geography curriculum projects of 1970s.Re-appearance in thinking skills in late 1990s?

Geography’s involvement with e.g. environmentaleducation, global education, multi-culturalism.Prevalent in the 1970s and 80s radical geography.Interest by 1997 Labour government in sustainabledevelopment education and citizenship seems to offeropportunities but may be a utilitarian reaction to societalconcerns.

The Geography, Schools and Industry project 1983–91used work-related contexts in a progressive way forcurriculum change and active learning. In 1990s and2000s governments have promoted careers education,work-related initiatives and key skills, which are moreutilitarian in character.

Characteristics

• education primarily aimed at ‘getting ajob’ and ‘earning a living’

• a focus on useful information and basicskills

• restoring traditional areas of knowledgeand skills (cultural heritage)

• providing students with a set package ofknowledge and skills which will enablethem to fit well-defined places in societyand the workplace

• worthwhile knowledge as a preparationfor life; the passing on of a culturalheritage from one generation to the next

• emphasis on rigour, big ideas andtheories, and intellectual challenge

• focusing on self development or bringingto maturity the individual child/student

• using academic subjects as the mediumfor developing skills, attitudes, valuesand learning styles which will then helpthem become autonomous individuals

• education as an agent for changingsociety, so an emphasis on encouragingstudents to challenge existing knowledgeand approaches

• less interest in academic disciplines,more focus on issues and socially criticalpedagogy

• provides students with knowledge andskills required for work

• or use workplace and work-related issuesas a stimulus for learning skills/abilities

• or use work-related issues forquestioning status quo

Table 2: Ideologicaltraditions underpinning thegeography curriculum.Source: Rawling, 2000, p.212.

students for undergraduate studies. As Cresswellasserts:

‘I see no reason why students should not arrive

at university with a basic understanding of

philosophy of place ... I would like to see

students arrive at (university entrance)

interview with an interest in “place” and not

simply “places”’ (2008, p. 137).

Furthermore, the separation of Thirdspace awayfrom geographical ‘content’ to a ‘way ofapproaching’ geography is allied to what Jackson(2006) has termed ‘thinking geographically’. In hisdiscussion, Jackson cites the work of Lambert,who distinguishes between geography’s ‘vocabulary(an apparently endless list of place names) and itsgrammar (the concepts and theories that help usmake sense of those places)’ (Jackson, 2006, p.199, emphasis in original). The vocabulary of thegeography lessons described in this research hasremained consistent with and similar to thevocabulary currently seen in schools. Although itdeals with urban geography, the reasons for urbandecline, factors of multiple deprivation, etc., whatThirdspace challenges is the grammar – the way inwhich these places and ideas are approached andcontextualised for the students to engage with.‘Thinking geographically’ rather than ‘learninggeography’ is a major shift in emphasis forgeography teachers, and one which theGeographical Association supports through itsmanifesto (GA, 2009). Nevertheless, this approachis not new: in The Teaching of Ideas in Geography,the authors argue ‘in a discipline, the fundamentalconcepts which structure its thinking and havewide application are inevitably abstract ideas’(DES, 1978, p. 6). These ‘ideas’ can be presentedto students as concepts, generalisations, modelsand systems to facilitate understanding –Thirdspace provides a contemporary version ofthese approaches.

ImplicationsThis article has argued that teachers need toupdate their curriculum content to includeconcepts from the university discipline, yet someteachers are reluctant to move away from safe,traditional material of the current schemes ofwork. This may not be a product of unwillingness,but a belief that there should be a divide betweenschool and university geography. It could be arguedthat what geography students learn at schoolshould give them a basic level of understanding

that universities will build upon and develop. Forinstance, it is impossible for university lecturers todiscuss with undergraduates whether or not acentral business district (CBD) exists in an urbanarea if those students have no concept of thebasic idea of the CBD in the first place. Yet, asBeneker et al. indicate, ‘a very real question is howcan younger students offer an informed butindependent reaction to ... geographies they havenot been taught’ (2007, p. 265). In the context ofthis research it could be argued that studentsshould gain a sound understanding of Firstspaceand Secondspace in schools, even if suchterminology is not used; and the notion ofThirdspace be left for universities to introduce. Ofcourse if one followed this belief then schoolgeography would have not progressed from the‘capes and bays’ approach of the early 20thcentury. School geography would simply be aboutaccruing facts – viz the names of capital cities,longest rivers, highest mountains – and would notengage with ‘issues’ at all, leaving those to theuniversities, a (somewhat extreme) situation thathas been advocated by some in the geographycurriculum debate (see e.g. Standish, 2007). Atthe other extreme, there is a danger that in ahighly contemporary geography curriculum some ofthe more basic ‘core knowledge’ (as Hirsch, 1988,might describe) would be neglected. Of course,students should, as part of their time in schools,be developing the knowledge and skills that enablethem to locate countries on a world map, knowhow to use an atlas or understand how tides work.To say to teachers that they need to teachgeography taken from somewhere along thecontinuum from traditional (or old-fashioned) tocontemporary (or trendy) is too simplistic; abalance needs to be reached with ideas andapproaches from across the spectrum ofcurriculum content and ideological approaches.

Whatever critical arguments and debates occurbetween and within the geography teachingcommunity, the education of students has to beour priority; as Smith and Ogden indicate,‘students entering university are often unpreparedfor the kind of geography that awaits them’ (1977,p. 47). Thus, we do our students a disservice bysupporting the current ‘early 20th-century’curriculum, no matter how creatively we choose topresent the ideas. Geography’s success, Lambertand Machon assert, ‘will depend on howsuccessfully it speaks to young people and can


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entice them into a struggle with ideas, withargument, with uncertainty’ (2001, p. 207). If avariety of voices, including our students’, can helpinform a modern curriculum then this would havethe potential to create student-centered learningand, therefore, be more relevant.

ConclusionAs mentioned above, school geography has beenaccused of being ‘boring’ and ‘irrelevant’. Yet, asthe research reported here indicates, if we areprepared to enter into, ‘the contested cultural lifeworlds of young people’ (Hemingway, 2006, p.333) we can make the subject more relevant totheir lives. This kind of cultural geography has thepotential to ‘reinvest (school) geography with itsradical potential’ (Hemingway, 2006, p. 333). AsLambert argues, ‘we may need to throw out crustyold favourites ... in favour of … lessons thatchallenge students to make geographical sense oftheir own lives and experiences’ (see GeographicalAssociation, 2009, p. 3). By using Thirdspace (Soja1996, 2000) to approach urban social issues fromthe lived experience of disadvantagedcommunities, we can encourage our students tomake geographical sense of the lives of others.This will, in turn, help inform young geographersabout their own role in society, their own place andtheir own lives. Subjects such as geography can,according to Morgan, ‘broaden and deepen youngpeople’s understanding of the world around them,enlarge their knowledge of what they share withother people, and develop a critical awareness ofthe society and times in which they live’ (2000, p.69).

This author concurs with Taylor’s assertion that,‘over the next few years I hope there will continueto be a lively debate about enquiry, big concepts,key concepts and maybe even organising conceptsin geography’ (2008, p. 53). The time is right tointroduce concepts developed in the academicdiscipline to update and develop geography into a21st-century school subject that motivates andenthuses our students.

ReferencesBeneker, T., Saunders, R., Tani, S., Taylor, L. and van der

Vaart, R. (2007) ‘Teaching the geographies of urbanareas: views and visions’, International Research inGeographical and Environmental Education, 16, 3, pp.250–67.

Boyle, D. (director) (1996) Trainspotting (film). UnitedKingdom: Polygram Filmed Entertainment.

Brooks, C. (2006) ‘Geography teachers and making theschool geography curriculum’, Geography, 91, 1, pp.75–83.

Cresswell, T. (2008) ‘Place: encountering geography asphilosophy’, Geography, 93, 3, pp. 132–9.

DES (1978) The Teaching of Ideas in Geography. Somesuggestions for middle and secondary years ofschooling: a discussion paper. London: HMSO.

Firth, R. and Biddulph, M. (2008) ‘GTIP Think Piece:Fantastic geographies: geography teaching and theissue of knowledge’. Available online atwww.geography.org.uk/gtip/thinkpieces/fantastic

Princes Street, Edinburgh.Photo: Stuartsjb/Flickr.Reproduced under CreativeCommons licence 2.0.

geographies (last accessed 31 January 2011).Geographical Association (2009) A Different View: A

manifesto from the Geographical Association.Sheffield: Geographical Association.

Goudie, A. (1993) ‘Schools and universities – the greatdivide’, Geography, 81, 4, pp. 338–9.

Hill, P.W. and McGaw, B. (1981) ‘Testing the simplexassumption underlying Bloom’s Taxonomy’, AmericanEducational Research Journal, 18, 1, pp. 93–101.

Hirsch Jr, E.D. (1988) Cultural Literacy: What everyAmerican needs to know. New York: Vintage.

Hemingway, J. (2006) ‘Contested cultural spaces:exploring illicit drug-using through Trainspotting’,International Research in Geographical andEnvironmental Education, 15, 4, pp. 324–35.

Kent, A. (2000) ‘Geography: changes and challenges’ inKent, A. (ed) School Subject Teaching: The history andfuture of the curriculum. London: Routledge, pp.111–31.

Jackson, P. (2000) ‘New directions in human geography’in Kent, A. (ed) Reflective Practice in GeographyEducation. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, pp.50–7.

Jackson, P. (2006) ‘Thinking geographically’, Geography,91, 3, pp. 199–204.

Lambert, D. (1999) ‘Geography and moral education in asupercomplex world: the significance of valueseducation and some remaining dilemmas’, Ethics,Place and Environment, 2, pp. 5–18.

Lambert, D. (2004) ‘The power of geography’. Availableonline at www.geography.org.uk/aboutus/papersandresponses/#1027 (last accessed 31 January 2011).

Lambert, D. (2008) ‘Why are school subjects important?’,Forum, 50, 2, pp. 207–14.

Lambert, D. and Machon, P. (2001) ‘Conclusion: citizensin a risky world’ in Lambert, D. and Machon P. (eds)Citizenship Through Secondary Geography Education.London: RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 199–210.

Moore, A. (1999) ‘English, fetishism and the demand forchange: towards a postmodern agenda for the schoolcurriculum’ in Edwards, G. and Kelly, A. (eds)Experience and Education: Towards an alternativenational curriculum. London: Paul ChapmanPublishing.

Morgan, J. (2008) ‘Curriculum development in newtimes’, Geography, 93, 1, pp. 17–24.

Ofsted (2008) ‘Geography in schools – changingpractice’. Available online at www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/News/Press-and-media/2008/January/Geography-in-schools-changing-practice (last accessed31 January 2011).

Parker, H., Aldridge, J. and Measham, F. (1998) IllegalLeisure: The normalisation of adolescent recreationaldrug use. London: Routledge.

Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency(2009) National Curriculum: Key stages 3 and 4.Available online at http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-stages-3-and-4 (last accessed 31 January 2011).

Rawding, C. (2007) Theory into Practice: Understandingplace as process. Sheffield: GeographicalAssociation.

Rawling, E. (2000) ‘Ideology, politics and curriculumchange: reflections on school geography 2000’,Geography, 85, 3, pp. 209–20.

RGS-IBG (2009) ‘Analysis of the 2009 examinationresults and the current status of geography inEngland, Wales and Northern Ireland’. Availableonline at www.rgs.org/OurWork/Schools/Geography+in+the+UK+curriculum/Results+analysis.htm (last

accessed 31 January 2011).Smith, D. and Ogden, P. (1977) ‘Reformation and

revolution in human geography’ in Lee, R. (ed)Change and Tradition: Geography’s new frontiers.London: Department of Geography, Queen MaryCollege, University of London.

Smith, S. (2005) ‘Society-Space’ in Cloke, P., Crang, P. andGoodwin, M. (eds) Introducing Human Geographies(second edition). Maidenhead: Hodder Arnold, pp.28–58.

Soja, E. (1996) Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell.Soja, E. (2000) Postmetropolis. Oxford: Blackwell.Standish, A. (2007) ‘Geography used to be about maps’

in Whelan, R. (ed) The Corruption of the Curriculum.London: CIVITAS, pp. 28–58.

Taylor, L. (2008) ‘Key concepts and medium termplanning’, Teaching Geography, 33, 2, pp. 50–4.

Taylor, L. (2009) ‘GTIP Think Piece: Concepts ingeography’. Available online atwww.geography.org.uk/gtip/thinkpieces/concepts/#5821 (last accessed 31 January 2011).

Welsh, I. (1993) Trainspotting. London: Vintage.Whelan, R. (ed) (2007) The Corruption of the Curriculum.

London: CIVITAS.


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Richard Bustin is a geography teacher atBancroft’s School in Essex (email:[email protected]).

@To find out more about using the Thirdspace concept in the classroom, read Richard Bustin’s article ‘Thirdspace:exploring the “lived space” of cultural “others”’published in Teaching Geography. Go towww.geography.org.uk/tg and click on the link tothe Summer 2011 issue.


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The origins anddevelopment ofgeographyfieldwork inBritish schools


Victoria Ann CookABSTRACT: Fieldwork is viewed by many as a central

part of students’ geographical education. How

fieldwork came to assume this status is perhaps

less well understood. This article explores the

origins and development of fieldwork as a traditional

part of students’ geographical education in British

schools. The non-linear nature of the developmental

process is attributed to the multiple influences from

both inside and outside the discipline that have

shaped the fieldwork agenda over the years. The

article argues that an appreciation of this diversity

is important to our understanding of the

multifaceted fieldwork agenda that is evident today.

Fieldwork’s origins anddevelopmentFieldwork’s origin as a traditional part of thegeographical education goes back to the daysbefore the subject of geography itself wasrecognised distinctively on the curriculum (Walford,2001). Fieldwork was, and continues to be, centralto the endeavours of both the Royal GeographicalSociety (RGS), founded in 1830, and theGeographical Association (GA), founded in 1893,(Brunsden, 1987; Marsden, 1998), organisationswhose work is arguably inextricably bound to thelegacy of the exploratory tradition (Gold et al.,

1991). However, the more widespreaddevelopment of fieldwork was fuelled by the naturestudy movement of Victorian and EdwardianEngland (Rickinson et al., 2004), which was inkeeping with society’s interest in flora and fauna atthis time. Two key figures allied to early studies ofnature were Psetalozzi and Huxley (Brunsden,1987). Huxley’s late 19th-century local studies ofnature (‘physiography’) had a profound influenceon educational methodology (Brunsden, 1987).Early fieldwork was frequently local in nature.Studies of school grounds and the school localitywere encouraged by Her Majesty’s Inspectors fromthe 1870s onwards and arguably sowed the seedsfor the development of local geographical fieldworkin schools (Ploszajska, 1998). The importance ofthe school locality to geography education wasreflected in Geikie’s (1887) pioneering text TheTeaching of Geography, which devoted fourchapters to this theme (Marsden, 1998).

Fieldwork’s early agenda was multifaceted. Asidefrom its role within formal geographical education,the literature reveals a secondary agenda:fieldwork’s social agenda. Ploszajska (1998)argues that from the 1870s fieldwork became a

popular means of teaching both geographicalknowledge and changing ideas of responsiblecitizenship. In her analysis of geographicalfieldwork in English schools from 1870 to 1944,Ploszajska describes how residential fieldwork,usually to rural areas, was increasingly undertakenfrom the late 19th century onwards. She arguesthat this captured the zeitgeist of the time in whicha return to the land was advocated in light ofdecreasing levels of agricultural production(Ploszajska, 1998). As the importance ofexperiential learning became more widelyrecognised by the 1890s, field trips to parks andsimilar environments also became a commonaddition to geography teaching (Ploszajska, 1998).Later, with the First World War looming, systematiclocal surveys similar to those utilised by Huxleybecame widespread. Reminiscent of the Germanpedagogical principle of heimatkunde (knowledgeof home areas) that was popular throughoutEurope at this time, the surveys were particularlyvalued for their ability to foster national patriotism(Ploszajska, 1998). The heimatkunde approachhad previously been accredited in the evidenceassembled for the 1886 RGS report entitled ‘InReference to the Improvement of GeographicalEducation’ (Marsden, 1998).

The heimatkunde approach also influenced thedevelopment of the school journey movement inBritain, which led to the establishment of theSchool Journey Association (SJA) in 1911(Marsden, 1998). Largely omitted from thehistoriography of geographical education, the SJAwas billed as the sister organisation of the SchoolNature Study Union (SNSU) founded in 1903. Bothorganisations reflected the commonly-held beliefwithin society at this time that urban areas wereunsuitable environments in which to bring upchildren, and so opportunities to experience ruralenvironments were encouraged. The number ofschool journeys within Britain fluctuated from oneor two per year from 1896 to 1902 to over 800 by1931 (Marsden, 1998). In the 1920s theformation of a continental section of the SJA led tothe development of overseas excursions. As aresult, in 1937 the Times Educational Supplementwas able to report that over 20,000 children weregoing abroad each year (Marsden, 1998). However,despite their common interests, the SJA and theGA did not share their ideas or resources(Marsden, 1998).

Fieldwork was not established as an importantpart of British geographical education until the1920s (Walford, 2001). At this juncture, Britishfieldwork took on a distinctive academic form thatset it apart from its American and Australiancounterparts, where the emphasis was (and stillremains) frequently on the ‘experience’ itself – achance to experience the ‘wilderness’ or ‘outback’(Walford, 2001, p. 105). Thus outdoor education inAustralia, with its associated images of physicalprowess and athleticism, is closely allied totraditional perceptions of what it means to beAustralian (Purdie et al., 2002). The moreacademic nature of fieldwork in Britain means thatit has evolved partly in response to paradigmchanges in the subject and pedagogicaldevelopments (Job, 1996). However, alsoimportant is the socio-economic context in whichfieldwork developed, as the formation of the SJAand the SNSU both demonstrated. Theproliferation of leisure time and private transportafter 1918 also helped to encourageenvironmental interest, which had knock-onbenefits for the development of geographyfieldwork (Walford, 2001). Demonstratingfieldwork’s alternative agenda, Walford (2001)contended that such fieldwork was linked (wilfullyor otherwise) to the development of children asbetter citizens and, more specifically, custodians ofthe countryside.

Academic influences are, of course, alsodiscernable. According to Everson, the oldestphilosophy of fieldwork in school geography is theEnglish approach called ‘field work, field studies,or field teaching’ (1973, p. 107). Everson (1973)specifically recognises the work of the eminentgeographers Wooldridge, Stamp and Le Play incontributing to this traditional approach tofieldwork in England. The traditional approach wasstrongly influenced by the regional tradition andwas characterised by observation, description andpassive student learning. Students were taught theskills to read and interpret a landscape, enablingthem to develop a sense of place in the landscape,but their interpretations were frequently lacking acritical element (Job, 1996). Everson, likeWooldridge, stressed the aim of developing an ‘eyefor the country’ through such traditional fieldwork.Working in America, Sauer (1956) was alsoconcerned with the primacy of fieldwork as ascience of observation. Rather than studying thehistorical development of landforms, however,


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Sauer was concerned with geography’s role instudying cultural landscapes.

The French school of academic regional geography,typified by the work of Vidal de la Blache, inspiredthe small-scale surveys that were undertaken inBritain after the First World War, as did the work ofHerbertson (1865–1915), Geddes and Le Play(Brunsden, 1987; Walford, 2001). Geddes (1854–1932), through the development of his ‘OutlookTowers’, helped to inspire a movement for regionalsurvey (Matless, 1992). Le Play (1806–82), whotravelled widely in Europe and Russia from 1835 to1854, valued local field surveys as a means forgaining insight into working-class conditions andthe need for social reform (Brunsden, 1987). Onceagain the social agenda of fieldwork is revealed,but whereas rural fieldwork was concerned withnurturing custodians of the countryside, urbanfieldwork was more concerned with socialinequalities. Geddes was the first president of theLe Play Society when it was founded in Britain in1930 (Matless, 1992). The Le Play Society (1930–60) ran nearly 100 field surveys, many of whichwere attended by school teachers (Walford, 2001).Le Play’s work was conducted at a time whenregional survey fieldwork was very popular. The GAhad even set up a Regional Survey Committee toencourage schools to undertake such fieldwork(Walford, 2001).During the inter-war period, concerns aboutagricultural decline and increasing urbandevelopment in Britain were rife. Such concerns,

coupled with the paucity of knowledge about land-use in Britain, spurred Dudley Stamp to co-ordinatethe ‘Land Utilisation Survey’. This survey was avery descriptive regional geography. (Stamp washimself a member of the GA’s Regional SurveyCommittee.) Conducted between 1930 and 1934,the survey aimed to create an accurate land-userecord that could be used to inform planning policy.It has been dubbed a classic modernist enterprise(Rycroft and Cosgrove, 1995) through its drive toensure that land was used responsibly. Thisconcern with responsibility further exemplifies thesocial agenda of rural fieldwork. Involving 250,000students from almost 10,000 schools, the projectis arguably one of the great achievements of inter-war geography in Britain (Ploszajska, 1998). Thesurvey has since been emulated by Alice Coleman(Coleman, 1961) in the 1960s and again in 1996by the Land Use-UK project. Stamp’s original(1930s) survey had led to the post-war Town andCountry Planning Acts; the purpose of Coleman’s(1961) study was to evaluate urban design. Thissecond survey was much more complex thanStamp’s original and printed maps on a 1:25,000scale were produced for some areas (Walford,2001). The third (1996) survey, organised by theGA in association with the Institute of TerrestrialEcology and the Ordnance Survey, included asection for surveyors to reflect on their ‘Views andvisions’ of the land (Walford, 2001), which reflectsan increased awareness of the importance ofaffective learning around this time.

Photo: Richard Gill

Following the success of Stamp’s Land UtilisationSurvey, geography fieldwork continued to grow anddevelop. Whereas the focus had previously beenlargely on rural fieldwork, during the 1930s urbanfieldwork became more widely accepted in schools(Marriott, 1997). In 1936 James Fairgrieve (1870–1953), an influential figure in British geographicaleducation, called for a move towards inductiveteaching methods involving the collection andrecording of data. These methods were underlainby educational philosophies stressing observationand empiricism. Thus, Fairgrieve specificallyadvocated the use of fieldwork as a means ofintroducing ‘reality’ into geography teaching(Biddle, 1985, p. 19). In 1938 the GA’s StandingCommittee for Geography in Secondary Schoolsissued a report that emphasised the importance oftaking students out of the classroom for localstudies (Smith, 1992). The founding of the FieldStudies Council (FSC) in 1943 led to theestablishment of a network of specialist fieldcentres across England and Wales, but again nomention was made of the SJA’s work (Marsden,1998). Some schools and local authorities alsopurchased their own field centres (Walford, 2001).Between 1945 and 1965 a series of handbooksand articles were published concerninggeographical fieldwork and local studies inparticular (see, for example, Wilks, 1956). By the1960s, signs of a formulated role for fieldworkwere emerging. Hutchings, in his presidentialaddress to the GA in 1961, praised the opportunitythat fieldwork provided for students to learnthrough observation. He claimed that ‘no child istoo young to begin field studies, and the earlier thebeginning the better the quality of the work likely tobe done in the later stages of school life’(Hutchings, 1962, p. 10). However, as fieldworkwas still not officially recognised as part of formalgeography teaching, during the 1970s fieldworkwas largely confined to post-16 teaching (Foskett,1999).

By the 1970s the traditional expositoryapproaches to fieldwork known as ‘field teaching’had been superseded by ‘field research’ (Rynne,1998). Field research involved testing theories inthe field that explain and predict the spatialpatterns of various characteristics of the Earth’ssurface (Everson, 1969). Everson argued thatcritics of this more scientific approach feared thatit may develop ‘an eye for a problem not an eye fora country’, thereby reducing the ‘thrill’ and

‘understanding’ gleaned from traditional fieldwork(1973, p. 111). The move towards field researchwas in response to the broader methodologicaldevelopments within the discipline that advocatedthe scientific method and pedagogical trendstowards more student-centred heuristic learning(Rynne, 1998). The intensive, small-scale nature offield research was therefore similar to the small-scale analysis of surface processes that had beenthe dominant approach in geomorphology since the1960s (Summerfield, 2005). Although thehypothetico-deductive system had become theleading framework for fieldwork by the 1970s, theapproach has been subject to criticism (Job,1996). A reliance on logical positivism was thoughtto undermine the authority of non-quantifiableforms of knowledge and experience, therebyrefuting the importance of the affective learningdomain (Rynne, 1998). Others argued that the useof restricted hypotheses focusing on only oneelement of a complex system fostered areductionism that failed to teach a holistic andintegrated view of the Earth. Unlike the traditionalapproach to fieldwork, this nomothetic, law-seekingapproach was criticised for failing to teach a senseof place. However, both the traditional approachand the hypothetico-deductive system have beencriticised for failing to include a criticalinterpretation of the landscape (Job, 1996). Caton(2006) has also argued that the hypothetico-deductive approach may not fully develop students’conceptual understanding. This may be partly dueto the over-emphasis on data collection andpresentation, but it may also be due to thetendency to discuss conceptual issues back in theclassroom when the data has been collectedrather than out in the field (Harvey, 1991; Rynne,1998).

Despite these criticisms, hypothesis-testing anddata collection in fieldwork remains popular inschools today (Job et al., 1999). However, thecriticisms of the hypothetico-deductive systemhave not gone unheeded, since they contributedtowards the emergence of an enquiry-basedapproach to fieldwork. The rise of enquiry-basedfieldwork was also fuelled by physical geography’ssearch for relevance and application, thedevelopment of humanistic and behaviourally-orientated approaches in human geography, thedesire to foster greater student autonomy, andincreased concern over misuse of the Earth and itsresources (Job, 1996). Enquiry-based strategies



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were heavily influenced by the work of theGeography 16–19 Project Team in the 1980s (Hart,1983). It was also around this time that fieldworkbecame an officially recognised part ofgeographical education for all ages with the adventof the National Curriculum in 1988 (Walford,2001). Enquiry-based fieldwork adopted moreheuristic approaches to the study of people–environment issues, representing a move awayfrom the primacy of the visual. However, criticshave argued that this approach also suffers fromreductionism because the questions that areasked are frequently too narrow.

Such concerns have led to the development of arange of qualitative fieldwork strategies in recentyears. Job (1996, 1997, 1999) has been aparticularly influential contributor to this field.Caton (2006) has identified four main categoriesof qualitative fieldwork: sensory fieldwork, trailsand expeditions, discovery fieldwork and fieldworkfor sustainable development. Such approachestypically adopt a heuristic, student-centredapproach to learning to varying degrees. Sensoryfieldwork, for example, encourages students toexplore the environment through their senses. Thisapproach capitalises on the embodied nature offieldwork and is exemplified by the ‘Mywalks’ web-based project undertaken by Fuller et al. (2008).The Mywalks project encourages students toconsider how vision, sound, touch and smellinfluence their emotional responses to differentenvironments. Discovery fieldwork is potentially themost heuristic, since ‘the entire direction andfocus of a study should arise from a student’sspontaneous interaction with an environment’ (Job,1996, p. 39). Here the teacher functions as ananimateur, responding to a student’s spontaneousinterest in an environment. Such qualitativeapproaches arguably provide a richer educationalexperience as a result of engaging with thestudents’ feelings and emotions, but, Caton(2006) argues, careful management is needed toensure that students produce worthwhileoutcomes.

Recent developments within geography haveplaced further emphasis on student-centredlearning in the field. Research has demonstratedhow attendance to the emotional and sensorynature of young people’s everyday geographiesmay support the development of geographyfieldwork in secondary schools (Cook, 2010). Such

work overlaps with the Young People’s Geographiesproject, run by the GA, which seeks to make youngpeople’s lives and experiences a central part of theschool curriculum. Specifically, the project aims tobridge the perceived gap between students’ livedgeographies, school geography and academicgeography by recognising the agency of youngpeople and giving voice to their experiences (Firthand Biddulph, 2009). The project has encouragedstudents to record their personal experiences inthe field through a variety of different means,including using images to explore students’personal geographies (see Monahan, 2009). Suchactivities may be used to develop students’ senseof place and local cultural heritage, importantfacets of fieldwork’s evolving secondary agenda. Afar cry from custodians of the land in the early20th century, fieldwork today is increasingly usedto explore issues of identity, diversity andcitizenship, as exemplified by the recent ‘Who DoWe Think We Are’ project supported by the RGS.

ConclusionGeography fieldwork in British schools hasdeveloped in response to many differentinfluences, both from inside and outside of thediscipline, and it continues to evolve today. Fromwithin the discipline, the exploratory tradition, theregional tradition, observation and empiricism haveall played important roles in the development offieldwork in the geography curriculum (Gold et al.,1991). Perhaps partly a result of this complexity,the developmental process has not been linear innature. Historically, a lack of integration betweenthe different proponents of fieldwork such as theGA, the SJA and the FSC has meant thatconsiderable overlap and repetition has occurred.


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Indeed, ‘many were the post-war articles which re-invented the wheel of field work and schooljourneying, as though they had never beenconceived before’ (Marsden, 1998, p. 93). Thesedifferent influences have undoubtedly played theirpart in shaping the multifaceted fieldwork agendathat is evident today.

We find ourselves at a potentially exciting time forthe future development of geography fieldwork, asthe move towards student-centred learning in thefield continues to gain momentum. Only time willtell how this affects the future of teaching andlearning in the field. While educational researchhas started to recognise and value the diversity oflived experiences that young people, as activeagents, bring to the fieldwork teaching and learningprocess, many are still constructed as passiveobservers in the field.

ReferencesBiddle, D.S. (1985) ‘Paradigms and geography curricula in

England and Wales 1882–1972’ in Boardman, D. (ed)New Directions in Geographical Education. London:Falmer, pp. 11–33.

Brunsden, D. (1987) ‘The science of the unknown’,Geography, 72, 3, pp. 193–208.

Caton, D. (2006) Theory Into Practice: New Approaches toFieldwork. Sheffield: Geographical Association.

Coleman, A. (1961) ‘The second land-use survey:progress and prospect’, Geographical Journal, 127, 2,pp. 68–186.

Cook, V. (2010) ‘Exploring students’ personal experiencesof geography fieldwork’, Teaching Geography, 35, 2,pp. 55–7.

Everson, J. (1969) ‘Some aspects of teaching geographythrough fieldwork’, Geography, 54, 1, pp. 64–73.

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Victoria Ann Cook completed her PhD at in theSchool of Geography, University of Leeds (email:[email protected]).


Ecotourism inAmazonian Peru:uniting tourism,conservation and communitydevelopment

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Ecotourism inAmazonianPeru: unitingtourism,conservationand communitydevelopment

Jennifer L. Hill and Ross A. HillABSTRACT: With reference to two ecotourism

enterprises that operate within Tambopata, Peru,

this article evaluates key principles necessary to

enable the successful achievement of ecotourism in

a little-developed tropical forest region. In so doing,

it highlights the intricacies of the relationship

between ecotourism, environmental conservation

and local community development. Principles are

identified as i) empowering communities by

integrating them in an ecotourism venture; ii)

exchanging knowledge between a community and

tour operator; iii) managing forest resources jointly

between a community and tour operator; iv)

minimising local economic leakage; v) educating

tourists through interpretive programmes; and vi)

minimising environmental and wildlife disturbance.

The article offers cautious optimism that the

tourism enterprises are consciously helping to

protect the rainforest of Tambopata, while meeting

the socio-economic needs of the local communities.

IntroductionEcotourism has been defined as ‘environmentallyresponsible travel to natural areas whichconserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people’ (The Ecotourism Societycited in Western, 1993, p. 8). Ecotourism shouldinvolve local people, feed economic profit into localenvironmental protection, and contribute to themaintenance of local species diversity byminimising visitor impact and promoting touristeducation. The challenge is to accommodateincreasing numbers of visitors seeking anintrinsically environmental tourism experience,while minimising the costs and enhancing thebenefits associated with natural area tourism (Boo,1990; Cater and Lowman, 1994). As such,ecotourism is being promoted by governments andthe tourism industry alike as a sustainablealternative to mass tourism, despite criticisms thatit can be just as damaging to the naturalenvironment and local cultures (Wheeller, 1991;Conservation International, 1999; Kruger, 2005).

Peru is the third largest country in South America,comprising three distinct physical regions: thewestern desert coast, the central mountainousinter-Andean region, and the eastern lowlandtropical forest which occupies the upper reaches ofthe Amazon River (O’Hare and Barrett, 1999).Here, we investigate two ecotourism enterprisesoperating within the Department of Madre de Diosin south-eastern Amazonian Peru. We evaluate keyprinciples necessary to enable successfulachievement of ecotourism in a little-developedtropical forest region and thus highlight theintricacies of the relationship between ecotourism,environmental conservation and local communitydevelopment.

Study areaSouth-eastern Peru is a hotspot of biologicaldiversity and this is reflected in its status as oneof the most protected regions in Amazonia(Phillips, 1993; Myers et al., 2000; Hill and Hill,2001). This article makes reference to the


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Tambopata National Reserve (TNR), created in2000 with an area of 274,690ha, and the BahuajaSonene National Park (BSNP), first created in 1996and subsequently extended in 2000 to an area of1.1 million ha (Figure 1). Unlike National Parkstatus, the National Reserve designation officiallypermits sustainable use of forest resources intothe future (Matsufuji and Bayly, 2006). The TNRand BSNP together support 1300 bird species,200 mammal species and approximately 10,000plant species (INRENA, undated). The keyattractions for tourists include relatively abundantpopulations of monkeys, macaws, giant river ottersand harpy eagles.

In 2006 over 40,000 visitors passed throughPuerto Maldonado on their way to the Tambopatarainforest (Kirkby et al., 2008). While the keymotive for visiting the area is to experience an

exotic location relatively close to Cusco, touristshave also expressed an interest in learning aboutthe forest ecosystem and its conservation (Kirkby,2002). Increasing numbers of visitors to the regionhave prompted a rise in the number of eco-lodgesalong the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers:from 14 in 1998 to 37 by 2007 (Kirkby et al.,2008) (Figure 1).

Two ecotourism enterprises are examined here:Inkaterra, a Peruvian ecotourism company that hasoffered ecotourism experiences since the mid-1970s; and Rainforest Expeditions, a privateecotourism company founded in 1992 by twoPeruvian conservationists. Inkaterra’s mission is togenerate profit while simultaneously helping toresearch and preserve the local ecology as well asaiding the sustainable development of localcommunities. The company has established a

Figure 1: The Tambopataregion in the Departmentof Madre de Dios, south-east Peru, showing themany touristestablishments in the areaand their relationship toprotected areas. Source:Paul Revell.


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parallel non-governmental organisation, the INKATERRA Association (ITA-NGO), which is funded byprofits gained from ecotourism and which invests inresearch, conservation, social development andeducation. The company owns and operatesReserva Amazonica Lodge (formerly known asCuzco-Amazonico), which opened in 1976 as thefirst tourist installation along the Madre de DiosRiver. Rainforest Expeditions combines tourismwith environmental education, research and localsustainable development to support theconservation of the areas in which they operate.The company manages three rainforest lodges: theTambopata Research Centre (opened 1989),Posada Amazonas Lodge (opened 1998) andRefugio Amazonas Lodge (opened 2006). For thepurpose of this article, only Posada AmazonasLodge of Rainforest Expeditions and ReservaAmazonica Lodge of Inkaterra are examined.

The two enterprises were selected because of theirlong history in the region as well as their focus onenvironmental conservation and communitydevelopment through tourism. There is a notabledifference between the enterprises, however, withrespect to the extent of community participation.The Posada Amazonas venture is highlyparticipatory, displaying many characteristics ofcommunity-based ecotourism (Cusack and Dixon,2006). The lodge is owned by the Ese’eja NativeCommunity of Infierno (a mix of native Indians andimmigrant peoples) and is operated jointly with

Rainforest Expeditions. Reserva Amazonica, bycontrast, is owned and managed by Inkaterra andinvolves local community members as employeesand service providers. This difference is primarily aresult of the geographical locations of the lodgesand their relative accessibility to Puerto Maldonado(Figure 1). The Reserva Amazonica Lodge islocated on the Madre de Dios River, approximately13km east-north-east of Puerto Maldonado andless than 5km north of the TNR. The PosadaAmazonas Lodge is located on the TambopataRiver, approximately 25km south-south-west ofPuerto Maldonado. It falls just outside theprotected area of TNR and within the nativecommunity land of Infierno. These differences inlocation and participation help to draw out somedistinct issues for consideration with respect to theachievement of ecotourism.

Research methodsA case study approach was adopted to investigateecotourism in context and to provide a detailedsource of reference material (Buckley, 2003).Primary data were obtained by participant activity inthe ecotour products of the two companies. Fieldresearch was carried out for two weeks in April2006, when the authors undertook a three-dayecotour at Reserva Amazonica Lodge, followed by afive-day ecotour at Posada Amazonas Lodge andthe Tambopata Research Centre. In order to ensurean authentic experience and avoid bias in productdelivery, the authors elected to identify themselves

Figure 2: The receptionbuilding at Inkaterra’sReserva Amazonica Lodge.Photo: © Jennifer Hill


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as academic tourists at the close of each ecotour.At this point they also obtained permission fromthe lodge managers and the tour guides to publishcomments and observations. Factual statementsoriginating from all interviewees are referred to aspersonal communications with the respondent’sinitials in the results.

Key informant interviews were undertaken with thelodge managers (Chris Blakeley at ReservaAmazonica and Malu Gutierrez at PosadaAmazonas) and allocated local interpretive guides(Yuri Torres and Oscar Mishaja at ReservaAmazonica and Posada Amazonas respectively).The lodge manager interviews were in-depth andsemi-structured, each lasting one and a half hoursand focusing on: the lodge’s tourism mission; theoperator’s role in mitigating the impacts of lodgeoperations and visitor activities on localenvironments and cultures; the role of visitoreducation in the ecotourism experience; the natureand extent of community participation in lodgeenterprises; and the destination of companyrevenue. Interviews with the interpretive guideswere shorter and more informal, focusing on therole of the guide in visitor education and the extentof local community involvement in lodgeoperations. Finally, after the authors’ return to the

UK, Kurt Holle, a co-founder and co-director ofRainforest Expeditions, answered the same semi-structured questions as the lodge managers viaemail. Mr Holle provided direct access to themotivations of Rainforest Expeditions and suppliedfirst-hand economic and socio-cultural data aboutthe company. Secondary data were accessed fromunpublished reports available from lodge librariesand staff during the field visits. This informationwas combined with published material from diversesubject backgrounds.

ResultsReserva Amazonica LodgeThe Reserva Amazonica Lodge (RAL) was opened in1976, and in 1977 the Peruvian governmentgranted the lodge an ecological reserve totalling10,000ha to administer ecotourism and research(Kirkby et al., 2000). In 1990, however, a newgovernment failed to renew the reserve status ofthe land and, subsequently, it was partiallycolonised by settlers. Undeterred, in 2004,Inkaterra obtained government approval for anecotourism concession over the land by signing abenefit-sharing agreement with neighbouringcommunities and demonstrating ongoingsustainable ecological management. The status ofthe Inkaterra Ecological Reserve today prohibits theextraction or conversion of natural resources bylocal inhabitants (CB personal communication).This allows Inkaterra to act as a direct agent ofconservation, but the arrangement necessitatesmaking payments to communities in cash and kindas described below.

Lodge buildings (including 34 private cabins) areconstructed from local materials in the traditionalarchitectural style of the native Ese’eja Community.The buildings consequently have a low visualimpact in the landscape (personal observation).The reception is thatched in the traditional styleand includes a circular mezzanine, built around thetrunk of a strangler fig, with balconies overlookingthe Madre de Dios River and surrounding forest(Figure 2). To minimise energy use by visitors, noelectricity is supplied to cabins, and kerosenelamps and candles provide lighting. Most cabinshave cold water supplies and visitors are advisedto use the resource sparingly (personalobservation). Non-biodegradable tourist waste istaken off-site and organic waste is composted atthe lodge or used as animal fodder by communitymembers (CB personal communication).

Figure 3: Section ofcanopy walkway close toReserva Amazonica Lodge.Photo: © Ross Hill


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The lodge receives general interest tourists whousually stay for three days, predominantly as partof international package tours to Peru (CB personalcommunication). The lodge possesses the oldestrainforest trail system in the area, with fourmarked trails covering 8km and providing accessto a variety of forest types. Inkaterra offers guidedwalks along the shorter trails, with visitorsexploring the longer trails at their leisure. Visitorimpact on the environment is thereby limitedspatially to these trails. Additionally, Inkaterra, inpartnership with the World Bank and NationalGeographic Society, has constructed a canopywalkway close to the lodge (Figure 3). This consistsof 275m of bridges raised 30m above the groundproviding views of the rainforest canopy. In total,there are two towers accessing the vertical profileof the forest, six platforms for viewing wildlife andseven hanging bridges (personal observation). Asmall fee allows access to the walkway andprovides entrance to an interpretation centre.Information in the centre describes the verticalstratification of the forest and the specialisedtypes of flora and fauna that can be found indifferent forest layers. The economic benefitsderived from the walkway contribute to educationand conservation projects in the Ese’ejaCommunity (YT personal communication).

At RAL information is supplied to visitors in anumber of different ways. Pre-departureinformation includes ecological detail about thesite and its biological diversity. An interpretive eco-centre on site explains how tourist activitiesbenefit the local community and environment. Mostimportantly, field interpretation by guides is relatedto current research, and slide shows about thelocal ecology (including information gathered fromresearch projects on-site) are presented to touristsafter evening meals (personal observation).

Figure 4 shows the itinerary for a typical three-daystay. The manager at Inkaterra stressed theimportance of a small group experience to hisclients (CB personal communication). Walksundertaken by the authors on the lodge’s trailsystem consisted of tourist-to-guide ratios of 4:1 or2:1. Minimising visitor numbers per guide ensuresa personal experience and reduces disturbance towildlife. This has been demonstrated by a 23-month study into the relationship between touristtraffic on trails and the diversity of 26 species oflarge mammal across five lodges in the region,

including RAL. The study found no significantdifference in species richness of mammalsbetween tourist trails and non-trafficked pathways(Kirkby et al., 2000).

The Peruvian guide who accompanied the authorsduring their ecotour was very knowledgeable aboutrainforest ecology and conservation, providing highquality bespoke interpretation. During a visit toLake Sandoval, visitors walked 3km to an ox-bowlake, stopping at a visitor centre to examineinterpretive information. The guide walked thevisitors around information boards, explaining theformation of the lake and how successionalvegetation change is causing the lake to in-fillslowly over time, while contributing to local speciesrichness.

Inkaterra promotes biological research within itsEcological Reserve, most of which is driven by theacademic interests of visiting scientists. Revenuefrom its primary economic activity, ecotourism, isused to defray the expense of the biologistsworking in the reserve (CB personalcommunication). In association with the NationalInstitute of Natural Resources (INRENA) thecompany funds and manages a primate rescuecentre on Rolin Island in the Madre de Dios Riverto rehabilitate endangered monkeys and toreintroduce them into their natural habitat. Since2003, Inkaterra has operated the Amazon Centrefor Environmental Education and Research(ACEER). This initiative is sponsored by theNational Geographic Society and it co-ordinatesprojects that benefit the local communities, suchas an environmental education programme forschool students. Although accommodation at

Day 1 (half day)Boat journey (45 minutes) along theMadre de Dios River to the lodge.Introduction to the lodge, includingguest rules in camp and in theecosystem. Guided walk along thelodge’s trail system. Evening naturepresentation on Amazonecosystems and local communitiesin the eco-centre.

Day 2 (full day)Morning trip by boat to Rolin Islandin the Madre de Dios River to visitprimate conservation project and

then to Lake Sandoval by boat, footand canoe. Afternoon visits to thecanopy walkway to view birdlife andto a native Amazonian farm tosample regional fruits and learnabout farming practices. Eveningriver tour to encounter black, whiteand dwarf caimans. Nightwalk locallyaround the lodge to find tarantulaspiders and other nocturnal wildlife.

Day 3 (half day)Early morning visit to the canopywalkway and forest trails. Tour of abutterfly farm at Puerto Maldonado.

Figure 4: Itineraryexperienced by the authorsat Reserva AmazonicaLodge over a three-daystay.

ACEER is primarily for researchers, ecotourists mayalso visit the centre (see ACEER website). Theproject fosters awareness of rainforestconservation among local, national andinternational stakeholders, including communities,government agencies, tourists and academicgroups (CB personal communication).

Inkaterra also supports development in thesurrounding native communities. Training insustainable forest management and agriculture(including crop rotation, natural pest control, soilmanagement) has been initiated for communitiessurrounding the lodge, with funding from the UnitedNations Global Environment Facility (CB personalcommunication). Tourists, with their interpretiveguide, can visit farms belonging to families of theLorin or Gamitana communities. Visitors areinformed about farming practices and areencouraged to taste the local ‘exotic’ fruits(personal observation). The farmers receiveremittance from Inkaterra for allowing tourists asvisitors and they gain extra money from the sale ofcraft items (YT personal communication). A smallshop at RAL also sells a variety of locally-sourcedhandicrafts, in addition to Inkaterra products(personal observation).

Posada Amazonas LodgeThe Posada Amazonas Lodge (PAL) is constructedfrom local materials purchased from the Ese’ejaCommunity and is relatively compact in size tominimise its ecological footprint (c. 1.5ha) (MGpersonal communication). The 30-room lodgecombines traditional indigenous architecture withlow-impact modern technology. The ‘walls’ ofrooms facing the forest are open verandahs toallow contact with nature, while those separatingrooms incorporate clay to regulate heat naturally(personal observation). The operation of the lodgefollows the same principles of resourcesustainability as described for RAL above (MGpersonal communication).

The Ese’eja Community became interested indeveloping an ecotourism partnership withRainforest Expeditions as competition fordiminishing resources within its communal landsincreased (Piana, 2000; UNDP, 2006). Themission of the partnership is to develop aprofitable ecotourism product that effectivelycatalyses the conservation of natural and culturalresources (Nycander and Holle, 1996). To this end,Rainforest Expeditions brings commercial expertisein the wildlife and cultural tourism market, and theEse’eja Community brings ownership of biologicallydiverse land and cultural heritage. A legal contractwas signed by both Rainforest Expeditions and thecommunity in 1996, producing a democraticallyelected 10-member Ecotourism Committee. TheCommittee represents the community in thepartnership and is elected by communal assemblyevery two years. It includes roughly equalparticipation of Ese’eja and immigrant men andwomen (Pauca, 2001). This 20-year contractguarantees that 60% of the profits from the lodgego to the local community and that decisionmaking is split equally among the two partners.Full operation of the lodge will be passed to thelocal community in 2016, entitling it to 100% ofthe profit. It is expected that by then thecommunity will have the capacity to manage thelodge without external assistance.

Rainforest Expeditions trains community residentsto occupy lodge positions and, currently, nearly allstaff members working at the lodge are from thenative community (Nycander et al., 2006). Apartfrom guides, the allocation of jobs follows arotational system where, after the EcotourismCommittee has shortlisted applications each year


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Day 1 (half day)Boat journey (approximately 2.5hours) along the Tambopata River toPosada Amazonas Lodge.Introduction to the lodge, includingguest rules in camp and in theecosystem. Introduction to theEcotourism Partnership. Visit 35m-high tower to view rainforest canopyand wildlife. Evening videopresentation about the rainforest ofTambopata.

Day 2 (full day)Visit Tres Chimbadas ox-bow lake –a river otter habitat. Undertake araft ride around the lake to viewwildlife and to fish for piranha.Continue journey (approximately 6.5hours) to the Tambopata ResearchCentre. Lodge orientation andguided ecological walk on foresttrails (12km). Evening educationallecture on Tambopata macaws.

Day 3 (full day)Dawn visit to a local macaw/parrotclay lick. Guided ecological walk onforest trails. Guided walk to anobservation tower at a palm swampto view a macaw nesting site.Guided night walk on forest trails.

Day 4 (full day)Dawn visit to a local macaw/parrotclay lick. Return journey to PosadaAmazonas Lodge. Visit a local farmto view and taste the farm products.Guided walk along forest trails.

Day 5 (half day)Guided walk along forest trail fordawn visit to 35m-high canopytower. View rainforest canopy andwildlife. Return to PuertoMaldonado.

Figure 5: Itineraryexperienced by the authorsat Posada AmazonasLodge and the TambopataResearch Centre over afive-day stay.


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and suitable training has occurred, each employeeworks at the lodge for two years before passing onthe position to another community member. Thishelps to spread income throughout the communityand means that community members leave asqualified workers. Currently, more than 50 ofapproximately 130 families in the community areinvolved in the venture; either directly as staffmembers, or indirectly as suppliers or members ofthe Ecotourism Committee. The partnership is alsocommitted to diversifying income. Thus, communitycrafts are sold at the lodge if they are equal inquality and price to those available elsewhere inthe market (MG personal communication). Thelocal community is able to express its voicethrough the Ecotourism Committee, which holdstwice-monthly meetings with Rainforest Expeditionsstaff to make decisions about hiring employees,solving staff problems and implementing itineraryimprovements (KH personal communication).

Visitors to PAL travel predominantly with all-inclusive tour operators and they generallyundertake between three- and five-day tours (MGpersonal communication) (see Figure 5). Thetourist-to-guide ratio does not exceed 10:1 in orderto minimise environmental impacts anddisturbance to wildlife (OM personalcommunication). The authors actually experienced

a tourist-to-guide ratio of 2:1 on a five-day ecotour,undertaken with a guide from the Ese’ejaCommunity. Rainforest Expeditions directorsrecognise the importance of interpretive guides tovisitors: ‘The guides make or break the guest’sexperience’ (KH personal communication). Theguide accompanying the authors proved to beextremely knowledgeable about local species,ecosystem functioning and conservation issues.During a visit to Tres Chimbadas Lake, for example,he indicated that it is the responsibility ofcommunity members to protect the lake. Heconveyed to visitors how this occurred during a rafttrip round the lake (Figure 6). Following a FrankfurtZoological Society management plan to preservethe populations of endangered giant river ottersthat inhabit the lake, tourists are restricted to itseastern half. The western half, which has highbanks suitable for otter holts, is off-limits totourists. This management plan has reducedhuman impacts on the otters, which have beenrecorded swimming, fishing and relaxing on theeastern side of the lake on a regular basis, evenwhen visitor boats are present (Dehnert, 2003).

The contract between Rainforest Expeditions andthe Ese’eja Community involves communityresponsibility for biological conservation (KHpersonal communication). PAL is located within

Figure 6:Wildlifeobservation from amanually powered raft onTres Chimbadas Lake.Photo: © Jennifer Hill


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Editorial

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10,000ha of communally owned land, 2000ha ofwhich are protected voluntarily (Nycander et al.,2006). Hunting of wildlife considered a tourismresource, such as jaguars, harpy eagles andmacaws, is prohibited on this land. Likewise, thecommunity has committed not to fell trees in theareas designated for ecotourism (Nycander andHolle, 1996). There is an ongoing community

project aimed at conserving macaw populations onthe community’s lands, assuming that this will bebeneficial not only to the breeding success of thebirds but also to the long-term success of thelodge (Figure 7). Over the short term, the projectprovides employment in the form of projectassistants and offers small cash rewards forfamilies that agree to host a macaw nest box ontheir land (roughly US$25 initially plus a furtherUS$25 if one or more chicks fledge). Over the long-term, the project aims to increase the quality andquantity of tourist macaw sightings by increasingmacaw reproduction rates (Brightsmith, 2001).

A number of community projects have beenestablished to promote capacity building andprofitable business opportunities (KH personalcommunication). A computer house has beenconstructed for primary and secondary students,financed by families who work at PAL and who havechildren in the schools that will be serviced by thecentre. In 2000 a US$50,000 World Bank granthelped to initiate an artisans committee with 25community residents using local materials tocreate tourism products (Pauca, 2001).

Income generated from the lodge is invested in thecommunity. In 2000, net profits paid from thelodge to the community were approximatelyUS$15,000 – three-quarters of which was dividedamong community members and the remainderused for investment in education (UNDP, 2006). By2007 the figure had risen to US$148,000, againdistributed between private improvements in livingstandards and communal projects (KH personalcommunication). Positively, most families continueto engage in a variety of economic activitiesincluding farming and livestock-tending, thusavoiding becoming totally reliant on a single sourceof income (Stronza, 2007).

DiscussionSuccessful ecotourism requires fulfilment of socio-cultural, economic, natural and political objectives.Rainforest Expeditions adopts a fundamentalsocial principle with respect to the achievement ofecotourism; committing to community integrationin the ecotourism venture (Cole, 2006; Okazaki,2008). Community empowerment is identified as apriority, a responsibility that is recognised by thecommunity. A survey of 69 community members,undertaken by the Critical Ecosystem PartnershipFund, found that 87% of the respondents feltinvolved in the business of PAL (RainforestExpeditions, undated). However, in diversecommunities, culture and gender differences canlimit democratic co-management of ecotourism andconservation (Mitchell and Eagles, 2001; Mitchelland Reid, 2001; Southgate, 2006). Some conflictsof interest exist in the Ese’eja Community due toethnic differences among community members (KHpersonal communication). Likewise, in terms ofgender, Stronza (2001) found that fewer womenparticipated in the Posada Amazonas venturesimply because taking up employment at the lodgemeant living there and neglecting their householdduties. However, at the time of writing, thepresident of the Ecotourism Committee and 80% ofhandicraft suppliers were women. Additionally, themajority of lodge managers appointed byRainforest Expeditions have been women (KHpersonal communication). Conversely, there hasbeen less integration of local communities into themanagement of RAL. Inkaterra owns and managesthe lodge entirely, but it does employ localcommunity members as lodge workers, artisans,guides and boat handlers. This situation can beexplained largely by historical forces. Withdegradation of forest occurring rapidly in the early

Figure 7: A scarlet macaw,one of the key touristattractions in theTambopata rainforest.Photo: © Ross Hill


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1970s, due to uncontrolled land speculation (Yu etal., 1997), the establishment of an ecotourismlodge and associated ecological reserve was thefastest and most effective way to protect athreatened resource.

It is important to facilitate knowledge exchangebetween the ecotour operator and the community,and to foster the equitable spread of informationthroughout the latter (Vincent and Thompson,2002). Communities must be able to state theirdemands and negotiate equitable relationshipswith agencies in ecotourism development so as tomake informed decisions about their tourismdevelopment (Cole, 2006). There is an importantrole here for community organisations such as theRainforest Expeditions Ecotourism Committee,which allows ongoing interchange betweencommunity members and the company directors.At RAL, with a diversity of ethnic groupssurrounding the lodge (making information transferand community consensus difficult), there iscurrently less of a two-way articulation betweentour operator and the community compared withRainforest Expeditions. This means thatenthusiasm and vision come primarily from thetour operator (top-down) rather than the community(bottom-up).

Training in managerial skills is necessary ifcommunities are to accept increasingresponsibility for ecotourism ventures in the future(Victurine, 2000). To overcome the challenge ofinstilling these skills, Rainforest Expeditionsemploys an adaptive management strategy(learning by doing) in the operation andmanagement of its lodges. Likewise, Inkaterratrains local community members to managesectors of its activities in order to improvecommunity managerial capacity.

Joint management of natural resources between acommunity and tour operator can offer a means ofutilising resources sustainably. Ceding of authorityto a local community and allowing its members todecide how local resources are used, can be apowerful incentive to alter behaviour towardsconservation and thereby protection of naturalresources. This is witnessed in the Ese’ejaCommunity commitment not to hunt wildlifeconsidered a tourism resource, nor to log forest inareas designated for ecotourism. As onecommunity member noted ‘we do not have many

development options, but we do have flora andfauna’ (Stronza, 2001, p. 9). This is supported bya constant message from the ecotour operator thatnatural resources attract tourists and henceprovide revenue for the community.

Economically, income generated by tourists to aregion should be maintained in place and not lostto outside companies who transmit their wealth toheadquarters in distant cities (Ashley and Roe,1998). By offering a full range of tourist servicesthrough the companies directly (includingemployment of local people and using localproducts) both Rainforest Expeditions and Inkterrareduce such economic leakage. Integration of thecommunities into lodge operations ensures thatthe local people gain direct financial investment.

Environmentally, ecotour operators should aim todevelop visitors’ knowledge and awareness of thenatural environment and minimise local wildlifedisturbance (Lee and Moscardo, 2005). Bothlodges examined explicitly link tourism andeducation via interpretive programmes for visitors.Tourists are restricted to small groups in the forestin order to minimise impacts on ecosystems, and(as stated above) there is evidence that suchmanagement is protecting species diversity locally.Eco-lodge owners depend upon the protection ofthe surrounding natural assets as part of theirbusiness plans. A primary aim at RAL is tomaintain the biodiversity of its ecological reserveunder increasing pressure from human activities.The reserve is under threat from illegal loggerswho operate businesses in nearby PuertoMaldonado and from some community membershunting within the reserve. This venture highlightsthe tension that can exist between theconservation interests of ecotourism and thelivelihood interests of communities (Salum, 2009).In recent years the tension has been resolvedpartially through formal agreements with localcommunities in which they receive assistance toimprove their quality of life without damaging theforest. This has included technical assistance toimprove farm yields and to manage the forestsustainably. In return, the communities agree tohelp protect the ecological reserve.

Politically, for successful ecotourism to spreadmore widely (a strategic direction of Peru’s Ministryof Tourism) there needs to be government supportin terms of legal land entitlement. The Ese’eja

Community holds legal title to its land; andInkaterra holds an ecotourism concession whichaffords it management control over the forestsurrounding its lodge. At both lodges, therefore,tourist income is invested directly in forest andwildlife protection. Legally reserved status forbroad areas of tropical forest, in whichconcessions are awarded based on ecotourismmerit, would ensure protection of much larger andless fragmented areas of forest. Such extensiveareas of forest are necessary to maintainecosystem processes (Hill and Curran, 2001,2003, 2005) as well as to support ecotourism.Thus, any controlled expansion of ecotourism inthe rainforest of Peru, via community participation,is likely to be most effective as a component ofbroad conservation and development strategies,linked to national policy legislation.

ConclusionsConscientious ecotour operators adopt four broadcodes of socio-ecological and political conduct:indigenous community participation/development(employing and consuming locally, impartingmanagement skills); visitor education (provision ofpre-departure guidelines, in situ interpretation);environmental conservation (operating in smallgroups, minimising visitor environmental impact,avoiding wasteful practices); and minimisingeconomic leakage (employing local people,consuming local products).

The research presented here describes two largelysuccessful examples of ecotourism, but the extentof success is influenced by the level of communityparticipation. While Inkaterra has, to a largeextent, protected the forest surrounding its lodgeand spread the economic benefits of ecotourismthroughout the local communities by offering directemployment opportunities and supplying goodsand services to local residents, a lack of fullcommunity participation has resulted in partialdisturbance of its ecological reserve by localinhabitants and the company is unable toengender the capacity for residents to plan asustainable future for themselves. Conversely,Rainforest Expeditions has encouraged localresidents to be active participants in makingtourism a long-term option for their livelihoods. ThePosada Amazonas Lodge enterprise provides agood example of community integration inecotourism with respect to employment of localpeople, inclusive decision-making and stakeholder

ownership. However, the positive impact of fullparticipation may not be universal (Wunder, 2000).It depends on the ability of the ecotour operatorand local community to work together to securelong-term financial and technical support in orderto establish a foundation of indigenous leadershipand management.

Overall, this research offers cautious optimismthat ecotourism at Inkterra’s Reserva AmazonicaLodge and Rainforest Expeditions’ PosadaAmazonas Lodge is consciously helping to protectthe rainforest of Tambopata, Peru, while meetingthe socio-economic needs of the localcommunities in a largely sustainable fashion. Withdue acknowledgement of their varying social andgeographic contexts, the enabling principlesidentified here might be considered in other areasof the wet tropics.

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Jenny Hill is Deputy Head of the Department ofGeography and Environmental Management,University of the West of England (email:[email protected]) and Ross Hill is Readerin Geoinformatics, Bournemouth University(email: [email protected]).


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Football, placeand migration:foreignfootballers inthe FA PremierLeague


David StoreyABSTRACT: The connections between sport and

geography are many and varied. This article explores

one facet of this focusing on the increasing number

of foreign-born players in football’s Premier League

in England. In recent years the league has seen a

sizeable influx of players from outside Britain and

Ireland, a reflection of an increasingly

commercialised game with a global reach. From

data on players’ places of birth the

internationalisation of the game in England is

readily apparent, though distinct spatial patterns are

clearly evident. However, as the article shows, when

information on where players are purchased from is

taken into account it becomes clear that the

Premier League is more limited in its global reach,

with the majority of foreign imports being signed

from just six western European countries. The flows

of migrant footballers appear to be shaped by

various networks and channelled through specific

routes.

IntroductionThere is a myriad of connections between sportand geography. These include the geographic

distribution of sports and sporting facilities, theeconomic, social and cultural importance of sportin specific localities, and the connections betweenculture, identity and sport (see Bale, 1994, 2000,2002; Vertinsky and Bale, 2004). Looking morespecifically at football such issues as the spreadand diffusion of the game, and the connectionsbetween club, place and community can beexplored from a geographical perspective. Footballalso provides much scope for an exploration ofthemes of identity at various spatial scales –national, regional, local – whether evident throughintense loyalty to a club or bitter rivalries betweenteams (Finn and Giulanotti, 2000; Armstrong andGiulanotti, 2001). In considering ideas of placeand identity in sport in general or football inparticular, one area of enquiry is that of theconnections between sportspeople and the club orplace they represent. Originally teams tended to becomposed of players drawn from the club’simmediate locality. However, the evolution ofscouting networks and a transfer market in playershas meant that professional teams are nowcomposed of players drawn from elsewhere in thecountry and (increasingly) from further afield. A fewyears ago English club teams were likely to containat least a sprinkling of players drawn from thelocality; now they are much more national, andindeed international, in their reach.

Migration is an important social geographic issuebut, despite the pioneering work of John Rooney(1987), the migration of sports people is arelatively under-explored phenomenon. This articleexplores the comparatively recent influx of playersfrom outside Britain and Ireland into the FootballAssociation (FA) Premier League in England. Theincreasing transnational mobility of football playersmight be seen as symptomatic of the globalisationof the sport and an indicator of the lessening ofbonds between club and place (Duke, 2002). Forthe major professional clubs, their players are nolonger drawn from the immediate locality or indeedfrom within the UK or Ireland. The player pool nowappears global rather than national and it is this


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increasingly diverse make-up that this articleexamines. More particularly the article maps thegeographic origins of players in the Premier Leagueand assesses the extent to which this might bedeemed a reflection of broader trends of economicglobalisation and transnational migration (see Baleand Maguire, 1994). The analysis is furtherdeveloped by identifying those countries fromwhich players are bought (as distinct from theirnative countries), thereby casting light on themigrant routes traversed by footballers.

Football has always had important linkagesconnecting places. Some clubs were formed by, oras a result of, British migrants, and in someinstances this is still reflected in contemporaryclub names or colours. Athletic Bilbao’s origins andEnglish name are due to English migrant workersin the Basque country (Ball, 2003) and a similarexplanation accounts for Young Boys inSwitzerland, Go Ahead Eagles in the Netherlandsand The Strongest in Bolivia, among others(Goldblatt, 2007). The shirt colours worn byJuventus were reputedly borrowed from NottsCounty (the world’s oldest professional club)shortly after the Italian club’s formation (Lanfranchiand Taylor, 2001). Despite this early evidence ofinternational linkages, for many years Englishfootball remained somewhat insular withrestrictions on the importation of foreign players.While the migration of professional footballers is along-standing phenomenon, and quite pronouncedin countries such as Spain, France and Italy,migration of players into or out of Britain was muchless apparent (Taylor, 2006). However, recent yearshave seen substantial numbers of footballers fromother parts of the world arriving in the PremierLeague (and into the lower tiers in the Englishleague system). This internationalisation hasoccurred alongside the increasingcommercialisation of the game.

Migrating playersThroughout much of its history as an organisedsport in England, football in other countriesseemed to be viewed as inferior with English clubs,managers and players having little, if anything, tolearn from abroad (Harris, 2006). Such was theextent of this detachment that England did notenter the early World Cup competitions and Englishclubs did not participate in the early years ofEuropean club competition. While English clubsemployed many Scottish, Welsh and Irish

footballers throughout the 20th century (seeMcGovern, 2000) a variety of restrictions limitedthe importation of players from beyond the ‘Celticfringe’. Although there were some earlier importsinto the English game, it was not until the 1990sthat this really took off. A number of backgroundfactors help to account for this dramatic shift. Theearly 1990s witnessed a significant change inEnglish football with the advent of the FA PremierLeague in 1992–93. This is, as its name implies,the top level of club football in England and Wales.It formed as a breakaway from the long-establishedFootball League and the Premier League’s creationwas closely bound up with enhancing revenuegeneration from the televising of live footballmatches and from sponsorship. The league itselfis sponsored and is currently known as theBarclays Premier League. The advent of satellitetelevision, most notably Sky, led to a muchenhanced profile for the game, increased thenumbers of people who could watch live football(albeit in pubs or in their own homes rather thanactually attending matches) and led to significantsums of money entering the game as clubsenjoyed enhanced revenue from the mediacoverage. In turn this allowed clubs to pay playershigher wages, while (at the same time) thebroadcasting of matches outside the UKheightened the profile of English clubs. Both ofthese elements could be said to have made thePremier League an attractive proposition for foreignfootballers.

Overall, from the 1990s onwards thetransformation of football into a business (thoughnot necessarily a profitable one for all concerned)is very clear (Conn, 1997). This is amplydemonstrated by the acquisition of football clubsby overseas business people – a phenomenonwhich has been greeted with dismay by some fans.The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich ownsChelsea; both Manchester United and Liverpoolare owned by US businessmen; while ManchesterCity was purchased by the Abu Dhabi investmentgroup in 2009. Thus, from the early 1990sonwards the league became not only a much morecommercialised operation but also one with awider global reach and a distinct outward vision.Premier League games are now broadcast live inmany countries from the USA to China. While thishas obvious attractions for advertisers, from theperspective of players it means the league is aglobal stage on which to appear. More complex


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scouting networks and the proliferation of agentswho operate at an international level, combinedwith the impact of satellite television, has madeboth clubs and fans much more aware of playersfrom other countries playing in different leagues.The increasing commercialisation of the sport hasfurther contributed to opening up the game inEngland to overseas players who can substantiallyboost their earnings and profile, with knock-oneffects in terms of sponsorship and productendorsements.

Other factors have also contributed to the freermovement of players. Of particular importance isthe impact of what came to be known as theBosman ruling. Named after the Belgian footballerJean-Marc Bosman, who took legal action againsthis club, the result was that from 1995 onwardsout-of-contract players were free to join a new clubwithout the payment of a transfer fee, therebyenhancing the freedom of movement of playerswithin and between EU countries. Players now haveconsiderably more power in negotiating the termsof their contracts. In addition, EU employment lawhas meant that, although there have beenattempts to restrict the numbers of foreign players,

footballers are treated like any other workers andare entitled to work in any member state of the EU.The situation is different for players from outsidethe EU where certain restrictions continue to apply.The contemporary role of agents (operating onbehalf of players and clubs in facilitating transfers)in the game also rests on ever-more complextransnational connections. All of these factorshave led to the Premier League in Englandbecoming a more attractive option to footballersfrom various parts of the world.

It is tempting to think of the migration of talent asa borderless phenomenon, reflective of broadermigratory trends and characteristic of a moreglobal world (Castles and Miller, 2009). While wecan point to the Premier League in England as anapparent example of globalisation, this does notmean that geography is redundant or that bordershave disappeared from this aspect of football.There may be a general drift of players to countrieswith stronger leagues (Spain and Italy, as well asEngland) but the precise composition of suchmoves may also be influenced by colonial orcultural (including linguistic) linkages. Thus, manyplayers from Senegal, Togo, Cameroon and Tunisia

Arsenal vs Fulham, 9 May 2010. In the 2009–10 season Arsenal had only four English-born players out of a squad of 30.Fulham had seven out of a squad of 26. Photo: Wonker/Flickr. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0Generic licence.


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play in France; while a number of South Americans(particularly Argentinians) play in Spain. Moreover,there are still regulations preventing the movementof non-EU players, and clubs constantly devisestrategies to overcome these.

It is also not surprising that the influx of foreignfootballers into the Premier League from the late1990s onwards has been a source of considerabledebate among fans, sports journalists and pundits.For some it is seen as a dilution of the nationalgame, with clubs standing accused of losing touchwith their locality and many players characterisedas mercenaries with no attachment to the place inwhich they ply their trade. Some discourses displaya strong hint of xenophobia very much akin tomore general arguments about immigrants. As withother migrants, foreign footballers are sometimescast as not belonging ‘here’ and blamed fordisplacing ‘native’ workers. Such discourses alsotend to echo wider debates surrounding racismand identity in English football (Back et al., 2001;Garland and Rowe, 2001; Millward, 2007).

Foreign footballers in thePremier LeagueAs already indicated, recent years have seen amarked increase in the numbers of foreign-bornplayers (other than those from the Republic ofIreland) in the English leagues, particularly thePremier. Within this, certain ‘landmark’ momentshave been reached. On 26 December 1999Chelsea’s starting line-up for a match atSouthampton did not include a single Britishplayer. Instead an eclectic multinational selectionof French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Brazilian,Nigerian, Romanian, Uruguayan and Norwegianplayers represented the west London club. Furthermilestones occurred in 2001–02 when less thanhalf of all players who appeared throughout theseason for all clubs in the Premiership were Britishor Irish. On 14 February 2005, Arsenal’s team(including their five substitutes) for a match withCrystal Palace became the first squad not toinclude a single British or Irish player (Harris,2006). In a match between Blackburn Rovers andWigan Athletic on 23 January 2011, 22 differentnationalities were represented on the pitch. Theseexamples highlight a sizeable shift in the footballtransfer market and exemplify the recent trendtowards procuring footballers from overseas. Wheninternational matches take place, players from the

Premier League turn out to play for a wide range ofcountries with a sizeable number appearing insuch competitions as the African Cup of Nations. Itwould appear that professional football in Englandcould be viewed as a very specific exemplar ofwhat Vertovec (2007) has referred to as ‘super-diversity’, where the game depends on migrantsdrawn from a wide variety of countries and ethnicbackgrounds.

An examination of the first team squads of PremierLeague clubs in the 2009–10 season wasconducted using information maintained by theclubs themselves and which appears on theirofficial websites. Information on the players, suchas their country of origin and previous clubs, wascross-checked with a range of football websitesand publications such as the Sky Sports FootballYearbook (Rollin and Rollin, 2009); the latter isgenerally regarded as an authoritative source ofinformation on the game in Britain.

Looking at the composition of Premier Leagueteams (as at April 2010), it is obvious that themajority of players are not English-born and that awide range of nationalities is present. Only sixclubs had more English-born than non-English-bornplayers in their squads (Table 1). However, 42% of

ClubArsenal 30 4 1 25Aston Villa 31 18 3 10Birmingham City 31 17 7 7Blackburn Rovers 35 11 5 19Bolton Wanderers 29 12 2 15Burnley 38 24 7 7Chelsea 30 7 0 23Everton 28 13 3 12Fulham 26 7 5 14Hull City 39 19 4 16Liverpool 34 7 0 27Manchester City 35 11 4 20Manchester Utd 44 16 8 20Portsmouth 26 7 3 16Stoke City 35 23 2 10Sunderland 29 13 9 7Tottenham Hotspur 31 16 2 13West Ham United 33 16 1 16Wigan Athletic 34 10 3 21Wolverhampton Wanderers 40 24 7 9

Number of players

in team born in born in Wales, bornEngland Scotland, elsewhere

Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland

Table 1: Country of birth ofPremier League players,2009–10 season.

players are English and a further 12% are from thetraditional sources of Scotland, Wales, NorthernIreland and the Republic of Ireland. Thus, althoughthere has been an undoubted transformation ofthe game, it is still the case that just over half theplayers are drawn from the UK and Ireland.Nevertheless, many of these domestic players arerelatively young squad members, most of whomare unlikely to become major stars. While foreignplayers are ubiquitous throughout the league, theproportions vary considerably between individualclubs. Arsenal has only four English-born players(plus one from Wales) in a squad of 30, whileBurnley has 24 English-born out of 38.

Though the relationship is far from clear cut, someof the more successful clubs appear to reachfurther afield with higher numbers of overseasplayers. The three clubs with proportionately morenon-English-born players – Arsenal, Chelsea andLiverpool – have for some time (together withManchester United) been seen as the ‘big four’clubs in the league (although Liverpool onlyachieved seventh place in the 2009–10 season).The clubs with proportionately least foreign-bornplayers were Stoke City, Burnley andWolverhampton Wanderers (Table 2). The latter twowere newly promoted in 2009–10 from a lowerdivision, and this was only Stoke City’s secondseason in the Premier League. To some extent this

will relate to the spending power of clubs and theirability to support and sustain internationalscouting networks. It also reflects levels oforganisation and managerial knowledge, theattractiveness of these clubs to players fromelsewhere and their ability to pay generally higherwages. It is notable that Hull City had more non-British or Irish players in its squad in 2009–10(16) than in 2008–09 (9), the club’s first season inthe top division. It is also noteworthy that theclubs with the greatest number of nationalitiesamong their playing staff were not necessarily fromthe largest cities. Instead, the most internationalteams hail from the north-west towns of Blackburn,Bolton and Wigan with 16, 15 and 14 countriesrepresented in their respective first team squads.

OriginsWhile the multinational complexion of the PremierLeague is readily apparent (Table 3), there is also a


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Club Percentage of players born in England

Stoke City 66Burnley 63Wolverhampton Wanderers 60Aston Villa 58Birmingham City 55Tottenham Hotspur 52Hull City 49West Ham United 49Everton 46Sunderland 45Bolton Wanderers 41Manchester United 36Blackburn Rovers 31Manchester City 31Wigan Athletic 29Fulham 27Portsmouth 27Chelsea 23Liverpool 21Arsenal 13

Table 2: Percentage ofPremier League playersborn in England, 2009–10season.

Country of origin Number of playersFrance 37Republic of Ireland 33Scotland 20Brazil 17Spain 15Netherlands 15Northern Ireland 13Nigeria 12Wales 10USA 10Ivory Coast 9Senegal 9Italy 8Germany 8Argentina 8Hungary 7Denmark 6Portugal 6Ghana 6Norway 6Serbia 6Belgium 6Poland 5Australia 5Democratic Republic of the Congo 5Sweden 5Czech Republic 5South Africa 5Other 71

Table 3: Number of players from each country playing forPremier League clubs during the 2009–10 season.



distinct geographical pattern to this, with someregions better represented than others. Themajority of foreign players emanate from otherEuropean countries, followed some way behind byAfrica and South America. Relatively few playersfrom other parts of the world have entered thePremier League (Table 4). In part this reflects bothlegal issues (such as work permit requirements fornon-EU players) and ‘cultural’ factors such as thedevelopment and popularity of football as a sportin certain parts of the world. South America, inparticular Brazil and Argentina, are recognised asmajor footballing heartlands while recent decadeshave seen the steady rise of a number of Africancountries as forces to be reckoned with (Nigeriaand Ivory Coast for example). This also explainswhy, even in these regional blocks, a relativelysmall number of countries dominate the playerpool. Brazil and Argentina account for almost three-quarters of South American footballers playing inthe league while Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegalaccount for more than half of the Africanfootballers (Figure 1).

Although there may be generic factors attractingplayers to English clubs there may also be morespecific reasons explaining why they arrive at aparticular club. Thus, the specific ‘ethnic’composition of individual teams may be due to anarray of factors. Looking at the clubs with thebiggest proportions of foreign-born players,Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool were all managedby foreign-born managers in 2009–10: theFrenchman Arsene Wenger manages Arsenal andthe Spaniard Rafael Benitez was at Liverpool, whilein recent years Chelsea has been managed bythree Italians, two Dutchmen, a Portuguese, anIsraeli and a Brazilian. Elsewhere, Portsmouth wasmanaged by an Israeli in 2009–10 (Avram Grant),

Wigan by a Spaniard (Roberto Martinez) andManchester City by an Italian (Roberto Mancini).Although Fulham was managed by an Englishman(Roy Hodgson), he has (unusually for an Englishmanager) extensive experience of managing clubsand international teams in a number of othercountries. It could be argued that these clubsbenefit from a wider knowledge of, and connectionwith, players and clubs in other countries. Foreignmanagers may also retain close connections withtheir native countries, or with countries in whichthey previously worked, having a better knowledgeof the game, and closer personal contacts, inthose countries. Liverpool’s team has a notablebias towards players from Spain (five) andArgentina (four), which is probably due to the thenSpanish manager and support staff connections.Similarly, Arsenal appear to favour players fromFrance (seven) or French-speaking players (afurther five of the squad are from countries inwhich French is widely spoken), an apparentconsequence of the French manager’s connectionsand the club’s scouting activities. When thePortuguese Jose Mourinho became Chelseamanager in 2004, one of his first acts was to signtwo Portuguese internationals (Paulo Ferreira andRicardo Carvalho) from his former Portuguese clubFC Porto. In 2008, one of Mourinho’s successors

Region of origin Number of playersScotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland 76Other European Union countries 137Other Europe 33South America 36North and Central America and Caribbean 26Africa 55Australia, New Zealand and Pacific 7Middle East 5Other Asia 3

Table 4: Non-English-born Premier League players, byregion of birth, 2009–10 season.

Figure 1: Countries oforigin of African footballersin the FA Premier League,2009–10 season.

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at Chelsea, the Brazilian-born former Portugalmanager Luiz Felipe Scolari, immediately signedthe Brazil-born Portuguese international Deco(Anderson Luís de Souza) from the Spanish clubBarcelona. Sunderland has seven Irish-bornplayers (four from the Republic of Ireland and threefrom Northern Ireland). The fact that the club wasowned for a time by an Irish consortium, withformer Irish international Niall Quinn as chairman,and was managed for a while by another formerIrish international, Roy Keane, would appear morethan coincidental. Overseas managers (and thoselike Roy Hodgson who have overseas experience)may have better knowledge of players in somecountries and may specifically maintain links tothose leagues. In short, and echoing the work ofJohn Rooney (1987), it is important to emphasisethe role of recruitment strategies and networkswhen exploring the migration of sporting talent.

FlowsWhile birthplace data are useful in assessing theextent to which footballers from a wide range ofcountries ply their trade in England, this presentsonly a partial (and slightly misleading) picture. Inorder to obtain a clearer assessment of theinternational connections operating within theEnglish game, it is useful to look at the placesfrom which players are signed rather than theircountry of birth. In doing so, we find that only threeclubs (Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool) boughtmore players from abroad than from England. Manyplayers arrive in the country from abroad, but thenmove between clubs within England; thus many ofwhat have become known as the ‘foreign legion’are in fact signed from other clubs in England.Once again the more successful clubs appearmore reliant on players purchased from abroad;Stoke City by comparison signed only one playerfrom outside the UK and Ireland (Table 5).

The key finding here is that the spatial reach ofEngland’s top tier is more restricted than mightappear at first glance. One-third of foreign-bornplayers are recruited within England. Only 25players were signed from clubs outside Europe andover half the players were signed from clubs in justsix western European countries. France aloneaccounts for over one-fifth of imports (Table 6). Anelement in this of course is that EU players havefreedom of movement, whereas players arrivingfrom non-EU countries are subject to immigrationregulations. Other relevant issues here include the

Table 5: Premier Leagueplayers classified bycountry from which theywere signed, 2009–10season.

Club

Arsenal 30 6 1 23Aston Villa 31 23 2 6Birmingham City 31 21 6 4Blackburn Rovers 35 21 1 13Bolton Wanderers 29 18 0 11Burnley 38 26 8 4Chelsea 30 8 0 22Everton 28 19 3 6Fulham 26 17 0 9Hull City 39 28 4 7Liverpool 34 9 1 24Manchester City 35 21 1 13Manchester United 44 29 0 15Portsmouth 26 17 0 9Stoke City 35 34 0 1Sunderland 29 21 4 4Tottenham Hotspur 31 24 0 7West Ham United 33 21 1 11Wigan Athletic 34 16 3 15Wolverhampton Wanderers 40 32 2 6

Number of players

Total signed from signed from signed fromEngland Wales, Scotland, elsewhere

Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland

Frenchman Arsène Wenger has managed English PremierLeague team Arsenal since 1996. In the 2009–10 seasonArsenal had seven French-born players, plus another fiveplayers from countries where French is widely spoken.Photo: Ronnie Macdonald/Flickr. Reproduced under theCreative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.


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geography of scouting networks which tend toheighten the ‘visibility’ of players in some leaguesrather than others. It is striking that of the 55African-born players in the Premier League only twowere signed directly from clubs on that continent.Many African-born players are picked up fromFrench clubs because they have grown up inFrance. Clubs in other countries, such as France,do purchase players directly from African clubs,and there is a growing concern over the poachingof African schoolboys by European clubs as well astheir exploitation by agents and a range ofunregulated football academies (Darby et al.,2007). However, the recruitment of players fromAfrica into England is, on the whole, a moreindirect affair. The evidence presented hereindicates that the migrant streams of footballingtalent are neither as random nor as geographicallyextensive as might first be thought. Instead, thesocial networks of players, agents and clubmanagement play a key role in shaping thesemigrant flows.

DiscussionDespite the belief that English club football isawash with foreign players, the extent to which thisreflects a globalising trend is open to question.Premier League players are recruited from a morelimited range of places of origin than might initiallybe thought. Although in the 2009–10 seasonplayers were born in some 70 countries, they weresigned from only 34 countries plus the ‘home’nations. Even here the source of players is morespatially restricted with just over a fifth beingpurchased from French clubs. Some clubs appearto have well-focused linkages which bring in playersfrom specific parts of the world, while others arereliant on attracting players already with Englishclubs or playing in other western Europeanleagues. In summary then, the top division ofEnglish football shows clear signs ofinternationalisation and, although its reach may bevirtually global in terms of media andmerchandising, the backgrounds of Premier Leagueplayers is somewhat more limited than firstpresumed. Specifically, the routes taken by playersare more restricted than it might initially appear,with players being channelled within and between alimited number of countries. Personal contacts,social ties, recruitment networks and culturalconnections play a prominent role in explaining thedistribution of countries of birth or origin, within thePremier League generally and at specific clubs.

The resultant geographic patterns display amarked internationalisation with a strong degree ofregionalisation rather than what might be seen asa truly global pattern (see McGovern, 2002; Taylor,2006). All of this suggests that, just as withmigration more generally, networks of contactscome into play and help to shape the flows ofplayer migrants across international boundaries(see Fussell and Massey, 2004).

As suggested earlier, the growing number offoreign-born footballers has provoked somenegative reactions. However, the retention of apredominantly local fan base indicates awillingness to see multinational teams ascontinuing to represent or embody a place.Furthermore, the positive manner which many fansdisplay towards imported players suggests thatfootball (like many other sports) retains somepotential to act in a socially progressive manner.Indeed, it may serve to link places togetherproviding fans with an (albeit limited) knowledge ofa wider footballing world and connecting them toother distant places. Some years ago, Arsenal fanssang ‘he comes from Senegal, he plays forArsenal’ in honour of their Dakar-born, Frenchinternational Patrick Vieira. In 2006, BirminghamCity fans waved a large Senegalese flag in agesture of sympathy with the club’s Senegaleseinternational Aliou Cisse who had lost a number offamily members in a ferry disaster. And in 2007,Watford fans protested against a court decision to

Country signed from Number of playersFrance 44Spain 30Holland 17Italy 13Germany 11Russia 10Portugal 8Norway 8Switzerland 7Belgium 6USA 5Brazil 5Hungary 4Denmark 4Poland 4Croatia 3Serbia 3Mexico 3Other 23

Table 6: Non-English-bornPremier League playersclassified by country fromwhich they were signed,2009–10 season.


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deport their Sierra Leone-born player Al Bangouraon the grounds that he was an illegal immigrant.Such examples suggest that, in somecircumstances at least, sport can be seen asfacilitating positive social change (Jarvie, 2011).

ConclusionIn the context of high levels of sporting migration,there is evidence of both a retreat into insularity bysome and a broader acceptance of sporting‘others’ as legitimate representatives of place.Whether this is viewed in terms of traditional placeconnections or in terms of the internationalisationof the game, a range of geographic issues are atplay here. Football is an excellent arena in which toexamine migration patterns, ideas of identity andthe connections between people and place. Morebroadly, it can be argued that the substantial in-migration of footballers to the Premier League inEngland has contributed (albeit in a somewhatspecific manner) to Vertovec’s (2007) idea of‘super-diversity’ resulting from the arrival ofmigrants from a wide range of geographicalbackgrounds, displaying wide cultural diversity andlinked into complex transnational networks.

AcknowledgementsI thank Jo Dyson for creating Figure 1, and twoanonymous referees for their helpful comments.

ReferencesArmstrong, G. and Giulanotti, R. (eds) (2001) Fear and

Loathing in World Football. Oxford: Berg.Back, L., Crabbe, T. and Solomos, J. (2001) The Changing

Face of Football: Racism, identity and multiculture inthe English game. Oxford: Berg.

Bale, J. (1994) Landscapes of Modern Sport. Leicester:Leicester University Press.

Bale, J. (2000) Changing Geography: Sportscapes.Sheffield: Geographical Association.

Bale, J. (2002) Sports Geography (second edition).London: Routledge.

Bale, J. and Maguire, J.A. (1994) The Global Sports Arena:Athletic talent migration in an interdependent world.London: Routledge.

Ball, P. (2003) Morbo: The story of Spanish football.London: WSC Books.

Castles, S. and Miller, M.J. (2009) The Age of Migration:International population movements in the modernworld (fourth edition). Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan.

Conn, D. (1997) The Football Business: Fair game in the‘90s? Edinburgh: Mainstream.

Darby, P., Akindes, G. and Kirwin, M. (2007) ‘Footballacademies and the migration of African footballlabour to Europe’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues,31, 2, pp. 143–61.

Duke, V. (2002) ‘Local tradition versus globalisation:resistance to the McDonaldisation and Disneyisation

of professional football in England’, Football Studies,5, 1, pp. 5–23.

Finn, G.P.T. and Giulanotti, R. (eds) (2000) FootballCulture: Local contests, global visions. London: FrankCass.

Fussell, E. and Massey, D.S. (2004) ‘The limits tocumulative causation: international migration fromMexican urban areas’, Demography, 41, pp. 151–71.

Garland, J. and Rowe, M. (2001) Racism and Anti-racismin Football. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Goldblatt, D. (2007) The Ball is Round: A global history offootball. London: Penguin.

Harris, N. (2006) The Foreign Revolution: How overseasfootballers changed the English game. London:Aurum.

Jarvie, G. (2011) ‘Sport, development and aid: can sportmake a difference?’, Sport in Society, 14, 2, pp. 241–52.

Lanfranchi, P. and Taylor, M. (2001) Moving with Ball: Themigration of professional footballers. Oxford: Berg.

McGovern, P. (2000) ‘The Irish brawn drain: Englishleague clubs and Irish footballers, 1946–1995’,British Journal of Sociology, 51, 3, pp. 401–18.

McGovern, P. (2002) ‘Globalisation or internationalisation:foreign footballers in the English league, 1946–95’,Sociology, 36, 1, pp. 23–42.

Millward, P. (2007) ‘True cosmopolitanism or nationalacceptance of non-national players in Englishfootball: or, why “bloody foreigners” get blamed when“things go wrong”’, Sport in Society, 10, 4, pp. 601–22.

Rollin, G. and Rollin, J. (2009) Sky Sports FootballYearbook, 2009–2010. London: Headline.

Rooney, J. (1987) The Recruiting Game: Toward a newsystem of intercollegiate sport (second edition).Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Taylor, M. (2006) ‘Global players? Football, migration andglobalization, c. 1930–2000’, Historical SocialResearch, 31, 1, pp. 7–30.

Vertinsky, P. and Bale, J. (eds) (2004) Sites of Sport:Space, place, experience. London: Routledge.

Vertovec, S. (2007) ‘Super-diversity and its implications’,Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30, 6, pp. 1024–54.

David Storey is Senior Lecturer in Geography inthe Institute of Science and Environment,University of Worcester (email:[email protected]).


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ChallengingAssumptionsWake up andsmell the masala:contestedrealities in India

Wake up andsmell themasala:contestedrealities inurban IndiaCarl Lee

When, in January 2011, Michael Gove, the BritishEducation Secretary, exhorted geography to returnto ‘the facts’ (BBC News, 2011) I was still trying tomake sense of the challenge to certainassumptions that a recent visit to Bangalore, India,had thrown up. First the city, the state capital ofKarnataka, had changed its name from Bangaloreto Bengaluru in 2006. More importantly the ‘facts’about modern urban India are becoming

increasingly contested. Should the narrative beone of an technologically-advanced country led bythe towering wealth of its billionaires whose wealthwas brought about by the mighty transformativepower of neo-liberal globalisation? Perhaps thestory should be about the poverty, environmentaldegradation and slums as suggested by Indiabeing Britain’s largest recipient of overseasdevelopment aid (ODA). It appeared that now maybe the time to re-examine our assumptions abouturban India whatever narrative we are drawntowards.

In 2005 Thomas Friedman flew to Bangalore totalk to the high rollers of what had become knownas the silicon plateau. He travelled Lufthansabusiness class (Friedman, 2005) and returnedhome with his ‘flat world’ thesis based upon hisanalysis of intellectual and technological globalconvergence, and a worldwide best seller. In late2010 I followed, on Lufthansa economy class, toBengaluru. I returned home with thoughts notabout how flat this new global world was, but howincreasingly bumpy and unequal it was becoming.

As the New Year fireworks above Brigade Road,Bengaluru, illuminated the 100,000 revellershemmed into this brash strip of neon, restaurants,bars and night clubs of global consumerism, Indiaclearly had something to celebrate. With its grossdomestic product (GDP) growth rate edging backtowards the 10% it experienced in 2006 (Figure 1)India was ‘buzzing’. Its youthful urban populationsenses the city is at the dawn of a new consumer

Challenging Assumptions

Figure 1: GDP growth rateIndia 2007–10 byquarters. Source: TradingEconomics


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age, breaking through into the global élite, a player,a deal maker, confidently embracing globalisation.I had first visited India a quarter of a centuryearlier. It was a ‘third world’ country then. You feltit as soon as you hit the scrum at Delhi Airport’sarrival terminal. By 2010 the lexicon has changedand the airport has as well. Bengaluru’s shiny new,and calm, international airport sits 35km north ofthe city at the end of an equally new motorway.

At the end of the 1990s I returned to India andBangalore to research chapters for an A-level textbook (Drake and Lee, 2000). In this work we wereconcerned with trying to convey to students thaturban life in India’s growing cities was complex andcould not be left to a few case studies of slums (aone-dimensional approach that was often the dietof school geography at that time).

I travelled the city so extensively I could have got ajob as a taxi driver. I saw all life: the unrecognisedslums, the recognised slums, the old housingareas, the middle-class colonial cantonmentsuburbs and high-end Indiranagar. Bangalore was acomplex city where describing one area asindicative was as helpful as writing about theManor Estate in Sheffield and thinking that wouldprovide students with an overview of the city. Notthat I was blind to the glaring inequalities of theIndian city, far from it. It was this reality that Ifound most striking on my recent return. Bengaluruwas, like my home town Sheffield (Lee, 2009), a‘tale of two cities’ (Thomas et al., 2009). A storyabout the haves and the have nots.

One of the key narratives of globalising India is ofexpanding inequality as part of the price for itsstellar economic growth. That India is an unequalsociety is self evident. The country is littered withforts and palaces which are testament not tosome great egalitarian history but one riven byclass and caste, history and hierarchy. Yet whatIndia appears to be doing today is developing anew type of inequality; a type that is more familiarto anyone living in those countries in the worldblown about by neo-liberal globalisation.

In Mumbai, Mukesh Ambini, according to Forbesmagazine the fourth richest man in the world witha personal fortune of US$29 billion (Forbes,2010), has just run up a 29-storey house,apartment, palace, what could you call it? There isenough room for his 100+ cars, a helicopter pad

and health spa. The house is described as beingthe ‘first billion dollar home in the world’ (BBC News,2010) and consumes in a month enough electricityto power 7000 homes (Suryawanshi, 2010).

Such is the wealth within India, yet it is also thecountry to which Britain, in 2008, sent £613million of development aid, more than any other UKODA recipient (Townsend, 2010). India is, after all,a country where levels of rural poverty in stateslike Bihar and Orissa are some of the highest inthe world. Some 456 million Indians live on lessthan US$1.25 (Purchasing Power Parity) a dayaccording to the World Bank (2008). However, noton Brigade Road, Bengaluru, where US$1.25 orRs55 (approximately £0.60, 2011), buys aMcDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’ or a starter at Nandos.

My first foray out of my marble and glass three-starhotel on Brigade Road was to Bagalur, a longstanding and officially ‘recognised slum’, a 1960scity-edge settlement that had been overtaken bythe expanding city in the 1980s. I got lost becausewhere stood its once modest entrance off HennurMain Road is now a huge concrete flyover.

Bagalur was also not much of a slum anymore. InThe Urban Challenge (Drake and Lee, 2000) weused Bagalur as an example of a mature slumdominated by scheduled castes and tribes, halfconstructed with kutcha materials (tin and palmthatch) and without a legal connection to theelectricity grid. At that time a project to improveBagalur was about to be instigated (Bhaskara Rao,1994). This investment programme was led by low-cost seed capital for housing improvements ofRs20,000 (£450 per household at 1998 prices). lthad clearly led to a relative transformation. By2010 Bagalur was cleaner, better serviced, more‘pucca’ and on its fringes sat houses that reflecteda confident prosperity. Even cars lurked wherenone had been seen before. Everywhere peoplewere building, extending upwards and outwards,painting walls and connecting to the grid. Goatsstill roamed, water was still drawn from on-streettaps, small children still use the gutters as toilets,and the sewage system – well it sort of existed.What was evident was that quality of life wasvisibly improving. It was clearly no Dharavi, theMumbai slum that film directors Danny Boyle andLoveleen Tandan used for the film SlumdogMillionaire (Boyle and Tandan, 2008).Bagalur was still a poor area. It is just that the

Photo: Bryan Ledgard


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poor are not as poor as they were. They sit at theedge of global consumer capitalism and havedipped their toes in, buying pressure cookers,televisions and mobile phones. Clean water inevery home and proper sanitation may be justaround the corner. Perhaps even free health carecould be dreamed about if some of the wealth thatis being siphoned out of India by its super rich,upwards of US$16 billion a year between 2002and 2006 (Kar, 2010), could be captured by arevenue service not hampered by businesscorruption and cronyism (Dalai, 2011).

My next Bengaluru neighbourhood visit was toIndiranagar. It was, and still is, home to many ofBengaluru’s wealthy élite, although the city-edgeenclaves of exclusivity are an increasing pull forthis ever-expanding group who have built and

benefited from the city’s technological boom.Architect-designed homes, tightly packed butshaded by palms and spreading trees stretch ingrids away from busy thoroughfares along whichMcDonald’s, Pizza Hut and the ubiquitous (in India)Cafe Coffee Day compete for space. Mercedes,Range Rover and BMW supplant Toyota, Chevroletand Suzuki on the driveways. Personal trainers zipabout on scooters, well fed pedigree dogs arewalked, the small local park is well maintained yet,surprisingly in a city this dense, empty.

Soon the well-heeled citizens of Indiranagar will beable to rub shoulders with the rest of Bengalurubeyond the tinted windows of their air-conditionedcars. A new metro (light rail) system is on its way.This US$1.4billion building project is currentlydominating the city centre with huge elevated

Bagalur in the 1990s and2010. Photos: © Carl Lee.



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flyovers and towering stations stretched north tosouth and east to west in two interconnectinglines. But will it end the tortured congestion onBengaluru’s ever more overloaded road network?Probably not, but the metro system should mitigateagainst total transport structure meltdown in thecity.

The hard statistical evidence of the impact of neo-liberal globalisation on India’s socio-economicstructure will start to be unveiled by the country’slatest census as the data begin to be released in2012. Yet econometric analysis by theInternational Monetary Fund already points up twokey dynamics (Topalova, 2008): the reduction ofpoverty but growing inequality. Poverty has and isbeing reduced, both in absolute and proportionalterms. It is now hovering just above a quarter ofthe population (approx 300 million people) whenback in 1983 it was 47% of the population (345million). However the report’s author, PetiaTopalova, states ‘there was a marked shift in theway the benefits of growth were distributed acrossthe income distribution’ (Topalova, 2008, p. 24).Clearly, as Figure 2 demonstrates, after years ofnarrowing inequalities under a paternalisticsocialist state, India’s liberalised economic boomhas reversed this trend and the fruits of growth aredisproportionately being channelled towards therich, often the super rich. According to one recentestimate, 52 dollar billionaires in India control 25%of the country’s GDP – an accumulated US$276billion of wealth (Frank, 2009).

Bengaluru’s richest man, Wipro CEO, Azim Premji,has discovered philanthropy on a grand scale witha US$2 billion gift to fund primary educationprogrammes and teacher training (Rai, 2011). Hisis a view that business should also be concernedwith social reform. In this Premji is suggesting adifferent approach from simply market-ledeconomic liberalism.

Across India injustice is throwing up a range ofresponses. Naxalites (Maoist revolutionaries) inChhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Manipur take aninsurrectionist stance (Buncombe, 2010). Othersorganise around environmental campaigns and theholistic wisdom of Vandana Shiva (2005). InBengaluru, the most wired and numeric of India’smetropolises, it is no surprise that one responsehas been to map and illuminate the disparatedevelopment within the city by the use of‘Bangalore Patrol’, a joint project between TheTimes of India and the Janaagraha Centre forCitizenship and Democracy (Bangalore Patrolwebsite).

The objective of the Patrol, to empower citizens inpushing for civic improvements to their core qualityof life, is already being felt (Rao, 2010). In Figure 3the uneven spread of water resources is mappedacross Bengaluru’s 198 wards. What should not betoo surprising is that new areas of slums andenclave housing on the city’s periphery are theleast well served by a water supply that can barelykeep up with growing demand. However, thisincludes some of the city’s most desirable realestate, areas like Whitefield on the easternperiphery where many return migrants to India live;I met a few. They are paying premium prices for anarea of poor infrastructure, pot-holed roads andhigh walls to separate them from the poor. Theseare often the ‘revenue layouts’ – sub-divisions ofagricultural land on the city periphery transformedinto informal residential settlements often for themiddle and upper-middle classes (Ranganatham,2011). Success in securing infrastructurefrequently lies in the hands of overt politicalpatronage. Land scams, the ‘waste mafia’, the civilservice ‘permit babus’ and the plunder ofgovernment monies all make up the money merry-go-round which shapes the lives and aspirations ofIndia’s urban consumer classes. However as LeelaFernandes (2006) suggests in India’s New MiddleClass, it is these ‘consumer citizens’ that most

Figure 2: Social inequalityin India. Source: IMF.

Above right: Indiranagar,home to many ofBengaluru’s wealthy elite.Photo: © Carl Lee.

effectively represent how the new middle class hascome to embody the aspirant horizons of theliberalising Indian nation (Fernandes, 2006). It isalso these citizens who will pore over theBangalore Patrol data in an attempt to deducewhat needs to be done to improve where they liveand whether the real estate prices for their areaare justified.

As Bengaluru grows in prosperity and theexpanding middle class increasingly asserts itswill, it must be hoped that political change canoccur within a relatively clean and transparentenvironment. This is why initiatives such as theBangalore Patrol are important in arming citizenswith as much objective evidence as possible toenable them to evaluate their own residentialenvironments. Furthermore, the politically andeconomically marginalised urban poor need thesechampions to lift up their quality of life. It isprobably hoping for too much that a reduction in

inequality will result from economic liberalism; the‘trickle down’ will need to be more of a flow if it isto stymie the discontent from the bottom. This is arunning political sore and the critics are gathering(see Lamont, 2010; Mitra, 2011; Mukerj, 2006;Sivaraman, 2005).

There is no doubt that India and Bengaluru arewithin a transformative phase of their history. Theexuberance of New Year celebrations in BrigadeRoad in 2010 were testament to the bullishconfidence that is sweeping the country. Looking infrom outside one cannot help but be bothimpressed and concerned. The ‘Lakshmi‘generation (Rai Umraopti Ray, 2011), so namedafter the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity,are coming of age. Nevertheless one is leftwondering whether the shiny glitter of some of theirnew-found riches is blinding them to theimperfections of neo-liberal globalisation and theinequalities and environmental destruction which


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Figure 3: Overall waterquality scores for wards inBengaluru 2010. Source: Bangalore Patrol


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Editorialinevitably trail in its wake. What are the ‘Govefacts’ that should underpin my teaching of Indianow? Is it a flat world or just a more unequal one?

ReferencesBangalore Patrol website: www.bangalorepatrol.com (last

accessed 10 February 2011).BBC News (2010) ‘Wipro’s Azim Premji makes $2bn

Indian charity gift’, 2 December. Available online atwww.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11898761 (lastaccessed 10 February 2011).

BBC News (2011) ‘Gove stresses “facts” in schoolcurriculum revamp’, 20 January. Available online atwww.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12227491 (lastaccessed 10 February 2011).

Bhaskara Rao, B. (1994) Slum Level DevelopmentProgramme: Bagalur layout, Bangalore. Bangalore:Karnataka Slum Development Board.

Boyle, D. and Tandan, L. (2008) Slumdog Millionaire(film). Fox Searchlight.

Buncombe, A. (2010) ‘The Big Question: Who are theNaxalites and will they topple the Indiangovernment?’, Independent, 8 April. Available onlineat www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-big-question-who-are-the-naxalites-and-will-they-topple-the-indian-government-1938497.html (last accessed 21February 2011).

Dalai, S. (2011) ‘The mutant superbug: a liberal tradewind laid rules, set benchmarks for today’s systemiclooting’, Outlook, New Delhi, 11 January, pp. 74–8.

Drake, G. and Lee, C. (2000) The Urban Challenge.London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Fernandes, L. (2006) India’s New Middle Class:Democratic politics in an era of reform. Minneapolis,MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Forbes (2010) ‘The world’s billionaires: #4 MukeshAmbani’, 3 October. Available online atwww.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Mukesh-Ambani_NY3A.html (last accessed 10February 2011).

Frank, K. (2009) ‘52 billionaires control a quarter ofIndia’s GDP’, Revolution in South Asia. Availableonline athttp://southasiarev.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/52-billionaires-control-14-of-indias-gross-domestic-product(last accessed 10 February 2011).

Friedman, T.L. (2005) The World is Flat. New York: Farrar,Straus & Giroux.

Kar, D. (2010) The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit FinancialFlows from India: 1948–2008. Washington, DC:Global Financial Integrity.

Lamont, J. (2010) ‘High growth fails to feed India’shungry’, Financial Times, 23 December.

Lee, C. (2009) Home: A personal geography of Sheffield.Sheffield: FouFouPublishing.

Mitra, A. (2011) ‘A surrender to predators’, Outlook India,10 January. Available online atwww.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?269771 (lastaccessed 21 February 2011).

Mukerj, A. (2006) ‘Social inequality threatening India’seconomic stability’. Available online atwww.fastcompany.com/blog/anupam-mukerji/social-inequality-threatening-indias-economic-stability (lastaccessed 10 February 2011).

Rai, S. (2011) ‘Enter, the educational professionals’,Indian Express, 9 January. Available online atwww.indianexpress.com/news/enter-the-education-professionals/735229/0 (last accessed 10 February

2011).Rai Umraopati Ray (2011) ‘The shining stars’, Deccan

Chronicle, 1 January. Available online atwww.deccanchronicle.com/tabloids/shining-stars-388(last accessed 10 February 2011).

Ranganatham, M. (2011) ‘The embeddeness of costrecovery: water reforms and asssociationisation atBangalore’s fringes’ in Anjaria, S. and McFarlane, C.(eds) Urban Navigations: Politics, space and the city inSouth Asia. New Delhi: Routledge.

Rao, S. (2010) ‘Can’t get worse than this’, BangalorePatrol. Available online atwww.bangalorepatrol.com/Cant-Get-Worse-Than-This.html (last accessed 10 Febuary 2011).

Sivaraman, B. (2005) ‘Bangalore’s IT boom and the grimreality of globalisation in Karnataka’. Available onlineat www.cpiml.org/liberation/year_2005/january/globalisation_in_karnataka.htm (last accessed 10February 2011).

Shiva, V. (2005) Earth Democracy: Justice, sustainabilityand peace. New York: South End Press.

Suryawanshi, S. (2010) ‘Mukesh Ambani’s first power billin Antilia — Rs70L’, Times of India, 25 November.Available online athttp://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Mukesh-Ambanis-first-power-bill-in-Antilia-Rs70L/articleshow/6986001.cms (last accessed 10February 2011).

Thomas, B., Pritchard, J., Ballas, D., Vickers, D. andDorling, D. (2009) A Tale of Two Cities: The Sheffieldproject, final report. Sheffield: University of SheffieldSocial and Spatial Inequalities Research Group.Available online atwww.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/research/sheffield/a_tale_of_2_cities_sheffield_project_final_report.pdf (lastaccessed 10 February 2011).

Topalova, P. (2008) ‘India: is the rising tide lifting allboats?’. IMF Working Paper Asia and PacificDepartment. Available online atwww.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2008/wp0854.pdf(last accessed 10 February 2011).

Townsend, I. (2010) ‘India: development aid from the UKand other donors’. Available online atwww.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/briefings/snep-05578.pdf (last accessed 10February 2011).

World Bank (2008) ‘New poverty estimates – what itmeans for India’. Available online atwww.worldbank.org.in/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/SOUTHASIAEXT/INDIAEXTN/0,,contentMDK:21880725~pagePK:141137~piPK:141127~theSitePK:295584,00.html (last accessed 10 February 2011).

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Carl Lee is a Lecturer in Geography at theSheffield College (email: [email protected]).

@A short film showing the areas of Bengaluru mentioned in this article is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=49m8Hr9lVWg It was made for studentsstudying residential inequality in Indian cities.


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Editorial

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Waste:Uncovering theglobal foodscandal


Anna Krzywoszynska

How would you react to someone throwing half oftheir weekly shopping straight into the bin? Withshock, dismay, disbelief? And yet, in Waste:Uncovering the global food scandal, Tristram Stuart(2009) argues that throwing our food away is

exactly what we are doing, every day, on a globalscale. Stuart’s argument is potent and deeplydisturbing. In a world where nearly one billionpeople are undernourished and hungry (FAO,2010), and where unique natural habitats arebeing destroyed to make space for growing crops,up to half of the food we make globally is wasted.In this very important book, Stuart examines manyof the links in the food provision – and disposal –systems. He travels the globe to bring back richstories of production and destruction of food,demonstrating time and again that the extent ofhuman food waste is one of the most pressingissues in the world today. Food production,consumption and disposal are interconnected andat the root of many challenges faced by theglobalised world, including malnutrition, globalwarming and biodiversity loss. Simply by wastingless food, Stuart argues, we can make a massivestep towards addressing environmental concernsand ‘relieve the hunger of the world’s malnourished23 times over, or provide the entire nutritionalrequirements for an extra 3 billion people’ (p.193).

Spotlight on …

Photo: www.wrap.org.uk


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In order to find out how we have arrived at theseabsurd levels of squandering, Stuart investigateswhat happens to food in the supply chains. Hefocuses most of his attention on food consumed inthe UK, but brings in examples from the US andother countries (see Figure 1). Supermarkets,Stuart argues, are responsible for the majority offood waste, due both to in-store policies (such asoverstocking) and as a consequence of the powerthey exercise over other agents in food supplychains. Manufacturers, who are often bound byexclusive contracts, are forced to over-produce toensure they can meet last-minute orders. Farmersare similarly contractually bound to supermarketsand often discard the majority of their produce dueto absurd aesthetic standards (some of which areenforced by the European Union). The samebinding contracts then prevent them from sellingthe discarded produce to other buyers. Stuart’sbook thus feeds into the continuing public andacademic critique of power inequalities in the foodprovisioning system, discussed at length in, forexample, Young’s Sold Out! (2004), Blythman’sShopped (2007) and Simms’ Tescopoly (2007).

We are to blame too. Consumers in the UK throwaway one-third of the food they buy, and (Stuartsuggests) a radical shift in food buying and cookinghabits is needed to prevent this. True to hisactivist background, Stuart encourages us asconsumers to stop feeling guilty about wastingfood, and instead to ‘feel empowered by the senseof responsibility’ (p. 84). Throughout the book heprovides his readers with waste-reducing tips,including the best way to store lettuce, why weshould learn to love offal and how to interpret‘best before’ dates. A strong believer in consumerpower, Stuart also argues that only by ‘voting withour wallets’ can we affect changes in the behaviourof food retailers.Importantly, Stuart’s book shows that waste is not

just a result of the affluent West’s decadence: thedeveloping world arguably experiences even moreunnecessary food waste. In some less developedcountries the lack of basic infrastructure (such assilos, roads and refrigeration) and, in certaincases, corruption, have resulted in mountains ofgrain and fruit being left to rot while the populationsuffers from chronic undernourishment.

Less attention is devoted to the structural reasonsfor the current levels of food waste. While systemicwaste in the fishing industry is well researched – afull chapter is dedicated to the issue – Stuart’scritique of agricultural waste focuses on particularcases, rather than universal causes. For instanceonly two pages are devoted to the institutionalisedproduction of surplus which is the EU’s CommonAgricultural Policy. Modern agricultural productionis, without doubt, an extremely complex industry,and very little qualitative or quantitative researchhas been done in the area of food waste.Nevertheless, the lack of data is less of an issuethan its presentation. Waste succeeds inillustrating all the systemic reasons for food waste,but because the arguments are predominantlycase study-based, and scattered throughout thebook, readers may struggle to gain a coherentpicture of the global food waste problem. A recentarticle by Parfitt et al. (2010), which draws largelyon the same sources as Stuart’s book, is muchmore concise in this respect, and presents auseful structure on which to pin Stuart’s moredetailed illustrations.

In looking for underlying causes of ourwastefulness, the chapter ‘Evolutionary origins ofsurplus’ argues that the creation of surplus, andthe waste it entails, formed a necessaryevolutionary step in the development of humans asa species, in that it enabled the creation ofcomplex societies. According to Stuart thisevolutionary paradigm has now been supersededand, he argues, it is time reason took over fromgenetic determinism. This chapter draws heavily onthe cultural materialist school of thinking of MarvinHarris, which in these post-structuralist daysappears somewhat reductionist. It is also unclearwhat this chapter contributes to an already lengthy(451 pages) and complex book.

In the third part of the book Stuart discusses howthe food waste crisis can be resolved. He adopts a‘pyramid of use’ approach. Here all edible surplus

• In the UK up to 20 million tonnes of foodwaste are created each year, 4.1 million ofwhich is wasted at the household level.

• 35–40% of India’s fruit and vegetables go towaste before they reach the consumers.

• 77 million people in Pakistan suffer from thelack of food security, while 12.5% ofPakistani wheat is lost from the field to themilling, and up to 15% of its milk productionis wasted.

Figure 1: Disturbing foodstatistics. Source: Stuart,2010.


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food is redistributed to those in need, organicwaste is collected and fed to animals, and animalwaste and other organic remains are used toproduce clean energy. But how do we make thishappen? Consumer power, Stuart believes, is apowerful driver of change. He urges all of us to putpressure on retailers – although how exactly this isto be achieved, considering the lack of adependable supermarket ‘waste index’ and thecontingencies of daily life, is not clear.Policymakers are also a target for Stuart’s calls toaction. However, those UK agencies that work thehardest in this area – the Waste and ResourcesAction Programme (WRAP) and the Department forEnvironment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – haveboth recently had their budgets slashed and theirfuture activity seems uncertain. Regardless ofthese factors, I agree with Stuart’s conclusion that,‘making it expensive or more difficult forcompanies to waste food may be simpler, moreremunerative, and easier to enforce than targetingconsumers’ (p. 217).

As governments and companies are not in thehabit of quantifying their waste, Stuart struggleswith the lack of available data. He unravelscomplex calculations using an array of sources toarrive at approximate figures of food waste. TheAppendix is replete with useful maps, graphs and

tables and, rather than including all the figures inthe text, it may have been better to expand it evenfurther. While certainly alarming, the figures alsohave the effect of making the chapters difficult toread, and at times they obscure the clearer andmore readily-accessible messages that urge thereader to take action.

In spite of the lack of comprehensive dataavailable, Waste is extremely well researched, witha 40-page bibliography that lists the multiplesources Stuart draws on; with the WRAP, Defraand the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) ofthe United Nations as well as the (recentlydismantled) Sustainable Development Commissionamong the most quoted. Stuart also draws on hislife-long experience of ‘freeganism’ (or ‘dumpsterdiving’). This is an anti-consumerist movement inwhich individuals live on the foods and otherconsumer items discarded from the mainstreamconsumption cycles. Photographs of the amazingdumpster-found bounties Stuart includes in hisbook illustrate well the extent of the foodproviders’ wastefulness. The numerous interviews,visits and adventures with food waste that Stuarthas collected from around the globe whenresearching this book make for a data-richpublication.

The structure of the book makes it a challengingread, and positions it awkwardly as neither apopular science book nor as a full-bloodedacademic publication. While the three sectionsindicate a clear structure, in fact the chapters arevery similar: all contain a mix of the author’spersonal experiences, quantitative and qualitativedata from an array of sources, and a critique ofpolicies and behaviours of actors in various foodprovisioning systems. The book is alsounnecessarily difficult to use as a teachingresource because the section and chapter titles donot fully betray their contents. However, the indexat the end of the book partly makes up for thisshortcoming.

Stuart’s attention to numerical data, while pointingto the breadth of research that went into thewriting of this book, has the unfortunate effect ofdrawing attention away from the actual stuff that iswasted: food. Little attention is paid to the culturaland societal dimensions of the way we treat ourfood, and how we waste it. For example, Stuartcalculates that if an average Western adult needsaround 2000kcal a day, and we aim to providearound 130% of nutritional requirements of thepopulation to guarantee food security, then ‘asupply of 2600 to 2700kcal per person per daywould … be sufficient for affluent countries’ (p.174). This kind of reasoning obscures the questionof what kind of calories? Though Stuart admitsthat the tomato, in spite of its low resource-to-calorie efficiency ratio, may be essential to ‘oursurvival, perhaps, and our happiness’ (p. 89), he isgenerally unwilling to consider the culturalimportance of such food within other societalpractices.

More recent research (Evans, in press) suggeststhat perhaps we (as consumers) do not waste foodbecause we are careless, but because wastingfood is an element of our routine social practices.Stuart acknowledges that over-stocking the pantryin order to provide a variety of foods for our familymay be of importance to our identity as goodparents, but he then goes on to suggest that‘home economics education’ (p. 73) could easilychange this inefficient behaviour. Thus Stuartfollows the liberal/individualist way of thinkingabout how we act in society, portraying humanbeings as rational calculating individuals. Shove(2010) notes that the same kind of logic isemployed is governmental attitudes towardsclimate change, which see Attitude, Behaviour and

Choice (ABC) as the primary drivers of humanaction and put stress on individual behaviouralchoices. Stuart admits that culture bears stronglyon public attitudes towards food waste and statesthat while ‘there are legal, fiscal and logisticalmeasures that can be taken to reduce food waste… their strength will derive from what societydeems acceptable’ (p. 201). However, in Stuart’sview, the context (cultural, social) of action issomething that influences our behaviour, but is notan integral part of it; therefore, using our powers ofreasoning, we can simply shut it out. This approachmirrors the way that UK policymakers conceive ofhuman behaviour: their failure to encourage pro-environmental conduct in the population suggeststhis attitude may not be the best way to achievesociety-wide change. Instead, perhaps we need tothink that ‘relevant societal innovation is that inwhich contemporary rules of the game are eroded;in which the status quo is called into question; andin which more sustainable regimes of technologies,routines, forms of know-how, conventions, markets,and expectations take hold across all domains ofdaily life’ (Shove, 2010, p. 1278).

All in all, Waste is one of those books that leavethe reader with an urge to act, and in this sense itcertainly fulfils it purpose. Whether it is possiblefor us to act, and how we can best create a waste-free society, remains an open question.

ReferencesBlythman, J. (2007) Shopped: The shocking power of

British supermarkets. London: Harper Perennial.Evans, D. (in press) ‘From the throwaway society to

ordinary domestic practice: what can sociology sayabout food waste?’, Sociology, forthcoming.

FAO (2010) ‘Hunger’. Available online atwww.fao.org/hunger/en (last accessed 2 February2011).

Parfitt, J., Barthel, M. and Macnaughton, S. (2010) ‘Foodwaste within food supply chains: quantification andpotential for change to 2050’, PhilosophicalTransactions of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences),365, pp. 3065–81.

Shove, E. (2010) ‘Beyond the ABC: climate change policyand theories of social change’, Environment andPlanning A, 42, pp. 1273–85.

Simms, A. (2007) Tescopoly: How one shop came out ontop and why it matters. London: Constable.

Young, W. (2004) Sold Out! The true cost of supermarketshopping. London: Fusion Press.


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Anna Krzywoszynska is a final-year PhD studentin the Department of Geography, University ofSheffield (email: [email protected]).


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Obituary

Obituary Rex A. Walford OBE 1934–2011

It takes a very special person to fill a cathedral,but on 16 February 2011 well over a thousandpeople packed Ely Cathedral for a service ofthanksgiving for the life of Rex Walford. Relatives,friends, professional colleagues, former students,associates from the worlds of geography,education and drama, and many others gathered toremember this wonderful man. The news of histragic death in a boating accident on the RiverThames, followed by an agonising month’s waituntil his body was recovered, triggered a wave ofshock and disbelief among those who knew him.The service at Ely provided an eloquentconfirmation of the way in which Rex had touchedso many lives with his remarkable gifts. It alsocelebrated his zest for life, his energy andcommitment, his intellect and scholarship, hisinfectious good humour, his optimism and hissteadfast religious faith.

Rex was born in the north London suburb ofEdgware when it was in the throes of inter-warexpansion, stimulated by its role as the terminusof the Northern Line. The developing communityproved a fertile environment for Rex’s childhoodand he never lost his fondness for his suburbanroots. He would return to the growth of north westLondon and suburban society for his PhD researchtopic in retirement. His primary school yearscoincided with the Second World War and thebackdrop of aerial conflict over London must havebeen exciting for a youngster. Much later, as aCambridge resident, he relished his proximity tothe Imperial War Museum Duxford, attending manyair shows to experience again the thrill of Spitfiresand Hurricanes in flight.

As the war ended, Rex gained a county scholarshipto University College School in Hampstead. Hetravelled there each day by bus and tube,reinforcing a lifelong commitment to publictransport. His house was adjacent to the localAnglican church – another product of the inter-warbuilding boom – and this became the natural focusof his social life, incorporating as it did Bible Class,Scouts, Youth Club and Theatre Group. In 1952 hewent up to the London School of Economics on astate scholarship to study for an Economicsdegree. At the same time he joined the StudentChristian Movement (SCM) which he laterdescribed as ‘the key factor in bringing me to areasoned and living Christian faith’. Rex carried hisfaith lightly and was never judgemental, but itprovided the central thread to his raison d’etre andhis practical motivation to help others wheneverand however he could.

After successfully completing his first degree, Rexstudied for his PGCE at Kings College, London,passing with a Distinction. He was then given theopportunity to take a Theology degree at Kings andwas awarded his BD after just two years of work.During his student years Rex revealed his flair formulti-tasking. As well as his commitment to theSCM, of which he was the National Chairman1956–57, he was also moonlighting as a journalistfor the Hendon and Finchley Times, having begunas a cub reporter in the sixth form. At the age of24, Rex embarked on his first teaching post at StMary’s secondary modern school in Hendon. Theuntimely death of the departmental head meantthat Rex became Head of Geography on his firstday, a challenge to which he rose with typicalfortitude and skill. In the early 1960s theburgeoning higher education sector was seekingbright young subject specialists for teachertraining. Rex was appointed to a lectureship inGeography and Mathematics at Maria Grey Collegein Twickenham in 1962, rising to Principal Lecturerin Geography and, later, Senior Tutor over the next11 years.

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During this period Rex became one of the keyplayers in the development of the ‘new’ geography,mixing with like-minded individuals who wereseeking a modern alternative to the ‘capes andbays’ tradition. In the broader context of thesubject’s quantitative revolution, Rex used hispersonal enthusiasm for games to introduceteaching approaches rooted in role plays andsimulations. After observing Rex’s innovative work,John Morris, Chief Inspector for Geography,promptly instructed all subject HMIs to investigateit themselves. Rex was also heavily involved in theannual Madingley Seminars, arranged by RichardChorley and Peter Haggett to disseminate theirrevolutionary ideas. In 1969 his Games inGeography was published, followed in 1972 bySimulation in the Classroom (with J.L. Taylor). Inearly 1970 Rex co-ordinated the first of theCharney Manor conferences – a gathering of youngteachers and lecturers at a Quaker retreat inBerkshire which led to the seminal work NewDirections in Geography Teaching, edited by Rex.

Rex had married Wendy in 1969, the beginning ofa loving and supportive partnership that wouldsustain them both through lives of wide-rangingenterprise and fulfilment. In 1973 Rex moved tothe Department of Education at the University ofCambridge to run the Geography PGCE group. Overthe next 25 years he would launch the teachingcareers of hundreds of young people, nurturingtheir first forays into the classroom with a potentmix of inspiration, encouragement, practical advice,humour and rigour. It did not take long for the label‘ex-Rex’ to become a nationally-recognised qualitymark when appointing a new geography teacher. Aformer HMI recalls a visit to Rex’s PGCE group inCambridge in the mid-1980s:

That day was a model of good practice …

however, what was unusual, and especially

memorable, was the number of students who

quietly went out of their way to tell me how

much they appreciated Rex’s enthusiasm, his

understanding and skills, his high expectations

of them and the personal support he gave them

… they recognised that they were privileged to

be taught by him.

A great networker and committee man, Rex workedtirelessly to translate his and others’ ideas intoaction. He had joined the Royal GeographicalSociety (RGS) when he began teaching and signedup for the Geographical Association (GA) in 1960.

As the emphasis in geographical education shiftedfrom description and the memorisation of facts toenquiry learning, Rex was in the vanguard of thoseintroducing these exciting new methods to schools.He was a vital bridge builder between the highereducation sector and schools through hisprofessional activities, his own writing and theediting of several influential textbook series. By thelate 1970s Rex was a prominent figure in the GA,chairing the Education Standing Committee forthree years before becoming President in 1984. Inhis presidential year he led a GA national workingparty on the contribution of geography to amulticultural society. His crusading zeal constantlyenergised the promotion of geography as a vitalelement in a young person’s education.Nevertheless, he always remembered that learningshould be fun and, combining this with a ferventbelief in the need for strong factual knowledge ingeography, he instigated the Worldwise Quiz in1984. As secretary of its organising committeeand indefatigable main question setter, Rex wasthe driving force behind the Quiz for the next tenyears, during which time it is estimated that over15,000 contestants took part in schoolsthroughout the UK. Restless as ever, heimmediately began to plan two ground-breakingnew initiatives for the GA: Geography Action Weekand Land Use UK. The latter epitomised Rex’s loveof maps and mapping, harking back to thepioneering land use surveys conducted by DudleyStamp in the 1930s and Alice Coleman 30 yearslater. Both Rex’s projects came to fruition in 1996,establishing a template for future annual ActionWeeks and inspiring a second national survey byschools in the shape of Coastline 2000.

In 1988 Rex’s persuasive advocacy of theeducational benefits of geography led to hisappointment to the National Working Groupcharged with writing the National Curriculum forGeography in Schools. This controversial taskfollowed a difficult path, but Rex’s positive outlookand diplomacy contributed significantly to itssuccessful conclusion. At the same time, Rex hadbegun serving on the Council of the RGS-IBG,having been a member of its Education Committeesince 1981. In 1990 he received the Back Awardfrom the RGS-IBG ‘for contributions to geographicaleducation’ and went on to be a Vice-President,1993–96. He believed that all branches of thegeography community should be brought togetherfor the future health of the subject and was


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instrumental in the formation of the Council ofBritish Geography (COBRIG) in 1987, which hechaired for its first five years.

The 1990s was a decade of intense activity for Rexon numerous fronts. As well as his multitudinousoutside commitments, he became Acting Head andlater Head of the Department of Education atCambridge University, helping to guide itstransformation into the Faculty of Education. Hehad been made a Fellow of Wolfson College in1988 and also acted as Director of Studies atEmanuel and King’s Colleges. In 1999 he left theDepartment of Education, having been awarded aPilkington Prize by the University for ‘excellence inteaching’ in 1998. In the same year he wasgranted Honorary Membership of the GA, afterserving as a Trustee since 1992. He became anEmeritus Fellow of Wolfson College in 1999. Theapex of his official recognition came in 2000 whenhe received the Order of the British Empire fromHM The Queen ‘for distinguished contributions togeographical scholarship’. Each honour wasgraciously accepted with the modesty thatcharacterised Rex’s attitude to his manyachievements. He simply felt a responsibility tomake the most of his talents.

Any concept of retirement was impatiently brushedaside. As the new millennium dawned Rex wasputting the finishing touches to his scholarly opusGeography in British Schools, 1850–2000

(published in 2001) and was well advanced onresearch for his PhD at Anglia-Ruskin University.His thesis was a journey back to his north westLondon origins, combining the geographical spreadof the great metropolis with the role of the churchin creating a focus for faith and community.Following the completion of his doctorate in 2003,Rex worked long and hard to adapt his thesis forpublication – a project that was realised in 2007with the release of his book The Growth of ‘NewLondon’ in Suburban Middlesex (1916–1945) and

the Response of the Church of England. AltogetherRex was responsible for more than 30publications, spanning geography, education,theatre and religion, as well as contributing over100 chapters and articles to books, journals,magazines and newspapers. He also produced 50classroom games and simulations and authored ascore of schools’ radio and television programmes.His written legacy is rich and encompasses astartlingly broad range of topics, though one wouldexpect no less of such a renaissance man.

There were so many facets to Rex that, no matterhow well you knew him, he was always capable ofspringing a surprise. His exploits in the world ofamateur drama – as director, producer, author andadjudicator – deserve a full tribute of their own. Hewas a gifted pianist, with a deep affection formusical theatre and the swing music of his youth.Rex performed as piano accompanist to sopranoGabrielle Bell in delightful, intimate presentationsof classic songs. Rex and Gabrielle recorded twoCDs as well as collaborating on some of the manyweekend courses that Rex organised for theCambridge Board of Continuing Education atMadingley Hall. Sport provided another of Rex’sconsuming interests, as a frequent player in hisyounger years and avid spectator throughoutadulthood. Motorbike enthusiast and owner, Dinkytoy collector, Mastermind semi-finalist, publicspeaker, traveller: there was no end to the ways inwhich he entertained himself and those aroundhim. What everyone appreciates is the immensegenerosity with which he gave his time, energy,wisdom and kindness to thousands of others andhow grateful we are for an exceptional life lived tothe full. We remember him as a champion ofgeography and it is fitting to close with Rex’spersonal philosophy of the subject:

I remain convinced of geography’s potency to

teach both a stewardship of the physical world

and an understanding of the need for harmony

in the human world and of its great value in a

properly humane education.

Mike Morrish

Obituary

Tributes to Rex can be read on the GAwebsite. Go to www.geography.org.uk/news/rexwalford


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Reviews

Landscapes andGeomorphology: Avery shortintroductionAndrew Goudie and Heather VilesOxford: Oxford University Press,2010137pp, 11x17cmPb: £7.99ISBN 978-0-19-956557-3Pocket-sized and pleasinglyproduced, this is an invigoratingintroduction to the study oflandscapes. It will be a thought-provoking companion on a trainjourney and should find a place onmany reading lists.

Goudie and Viles set acompelling case forgeomorphology as a mainstreamscience, grand in its aims, rich inintellectual history. They aresuccessful in combining largeswathes with scatterings of detail.One section explains the globalsignificance of the Tibetanplateau, or leads us throughlandforms, processes and time(‘geomorphology has sometimesprioritized one of these three overthe others, but we now know thatthey are all crucial’ they commentdonnishly); the next takes us to atermite mound or shows thedesert dunes were destroyed tosculpt Palm Islands in Dubai.

The book has two keystrengths. One is the clarity of itsdistillation of key concepts:thresholds and sensitivity, ratesand scales, earth systemfeedbacks, for example. Second,like the landscape, diversity is itsgreat appeal. From atolls tothermokarst, optically stimualtedluminescence (OSL) to lightdetection and ranging (LIDAR), bogsnorkelling to the TenCommandments, it steers uslightly through a thousandthemes. There are plenty ofstimulating asides (for example,‘there is no geomorphologicalequivalent of DNA’).

The unexpected views includeSaturn’s largest moon: ‘The

images of the surface of Titan ...illustrate a landscape quite similarto that of Earth – except that thesurface is made of water ice, notrock, and sculpted by liquidmethane, not water’ (p. 124).There are plenty of worlds left toconquer – and this approachable,eye-opening guide is an excellentplace to start.Chris PyleThe Perse School, Cambridge

Natural ClimateVariability and GlobalWarmingEdited by Richard W. Battarbeeand Heather A. BinneyChichester: Blackwell, 2008276pp, 19x25cmHb: £55.00ISBN 978-1-4051-5905-0There is a need for moreinteraction between modern dayclimate science, which is heavilymodelling based, and the scienceof paleoclimatology, which for along time remained dominated byobservational approaches. Thisbook is therefore welcome as itaims to put a Holoceneperspective at the heart of thecurrent debate concerning climatechange, claiming to ask ‘howimportant is natural variability inexplaining global warming?’ by‘placing the past few decades ofwarming in the context of longerterm climate variability’.

For the most part the bookachieves this aim through detaileddiscussion of observed climatechanges over the Holocene;methods used to reconstruct pastclimate, including field and modelapproaches; and the physicalmechanisms responsible for pastclimate change. There is achallenge in organising such awide range of material, especiallywhen the chapters are written by awide selection of contributors, inthis case mostly from Europe,particularly Scandinavia. Studentswishing to find a clear survey ofeither past climate changes,methods or mechanisms will find

it difficult to navigate this volume,as many essays touch upon allthree, but in various proportions.

After an editorial describingthe content of the volume, thesecond chapter introduces thehistory of Holocene climateresearch from a classicScandinavian perspective. Otherchapters concentrate more onmethods, modelling and naturalforcing mechanisms, while afascinating discussion oflatitudinal differences in moisturebalance reminds us thattemperature is not the onlyvariable worth reconstructing.However, there are also chaptersexamining the role of humans inthe Holocene and land-coverchanges which do not fit in clearlywith the rest of the volume, alongwith a curiously specific chapteron the thermal maximum in theNorth Atlantic. A strong concludingchapter is also lacking. AlthoughBradley makes a good attempt atusing paleoclimatology to giveperspectives on the future, theeditors could have done more toplace the findings of the previouschapters in ‘the context of globalwarming’ which is the focus of thejustification for the volume.

Thus although there are someextremely learned discussions ofthe issues, the volume reads as acollection of research papers inpaleoclimatology rather than acoherent text suitable for A-levelor undergraduate teaching orgeneral reference. To be fair, theauthors claim specialistresearchers and advancedstudents as their main audience.The volume is well indexed andthe number of recent references isimpressive. It is nicely presentedand there is a good array ofdiagrams, maps and graphs. It isrecommended for those scientistswho need to keep up to date withan exciting area of climate scienceand gain a more integratedappreciation of climate variabilityover the Holocene.Nick PepinUniversity of Portsmouth

ReviewsEdited by Hedley Knibbs

Anyone who would liketo review resources forGeography shouldcontact Hedley Knibbsat GA Headquarters.


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ReviewsHong Kong:Becoming a Chineseglobal cityStephen Chiu and Tai-Lok LuiAbingdon : Routledge, 2009184pp, 15.5 x 23 cmPb: £21.99ISBN 978-0-415-22011-8This very readable and extremelywell researched book contributesgreatly to the understanding ofHong Kong’s place in China andthe world. It also provides anexcellent example of the manyissues relating to the developmentof global cities.

There are very helpful chapterson the historical origins of HongKong’s global links; the structuringand restructuring of the city’seconomy in the post-Second WorldWar decades; the socio-economicimpacts of economic re-structuring;the city’s pathway to its status asa commercial and financial centre;and its reintegration, botheconomic and political, with Chinabefore and after 1997, the yearwhen China resumed sovereigntyover Hong Kong.

Two very important issuesrelating to global city developmentare dealt with admirably: theconsiderable influence of politicalprocesses, and the way in whichsuch globalisation can lead toboth occupational polarisation andincreased income inequality. HongKong’s links with China are veryskilfully analysed. The authorsemphasise that the city faces adilemma: to what extent should itrelate first to the Chinese(national) economy and, second,to the global economy? Clearly,Hong Kong’s hope of closer co-operation with the mainland and afuture link with the country’soverall development depends to asignificant extent on its strategicvalue to the Beijing leadership.

Themes meriting greateremphasis might have been thegeographical issues relating to theurbanisation of the Pearl RiverDelta, and Hong Kong’scompetition with Shanghai as theleading Chinese global city.However, the book will provideboth A-level and undergraduatestudents with an invaluable basictext and a case study relating tothe development of global cities,particularly relevant in this contextbecause it provides further

insights into the influence ofChina as an emerging worldsuperpower.Trevor HigginbottomXiehe Education Organisation,Shanghai

The EconomicGeography of the UKEdited by Neil N. Coe and AndrewJonesLondon: SAGE, 2010264pp, 17x24cmPb: £24.99ISBN 978-1-84920-090-5This book is divided into fourparts. The first begins with anoverview of the shiftinggeographies of the UK economy.Other chapters look at the north–south divide and uneven regionalgrowth. The chapters introduce anew north–south divide (from theSevern to the Humber) and bringin some useful data from therecession that began in 2008.The second (Landscapes ofpower, inequality and finance),deals with the City and finance,financial services, the geographyof UK government finance, stateand economy, housing and thepension gap. The chapters arerelatively short, concise, clearlywritten and accessible. They arealso relatively up to date – asmuch as the authors could hopeto be.

Many students (especiallythose at A-level) will find the thirdsection the most interesting anduseful. Here there are updates onmanufacturing, agriculture,retailing, the UK energy dilemmaand business services. The finalsection refers to social changeand includes chapters on the UK’schanging labour market,immigration, the UK and CentralEurope and the UK in the era ofglobalisation.

This book will help readers tograsp the widespread and far-reaching changes taking place inhuman geography in the UK. Toproduce a book that covers somany of these, and that providesdata that is (in some cases) from2009 is a real achievement. Thisbook will prove invaluable forteachers and university students.For A-level students that want toput some distance betweenthemselves and their fellowcompetitors they could do far

worse than to have a browsethrough this resource.Garrett NagleSt Edward’s School, Oxford

The Rise of Chinaand India in AfricaEdited by Fantu Cheru and CyrilObiLondon: Zed Books, 2010276pp, 15.5x23cmPb: £21.99ISBN 978-1-84813-437-9This is a collection of essayscompiled for the Nordic Instituteexamining the impact of the twonew ‘giants’ of the globaleconomy, China and India, on theAfrican continent. Through aseries of critical commentaries weare led to view this impact fromthe perspective of the Africanstates, particularly with regard tothe question of the formation of a‘southern consensus’. This termis used to contrast the way inwhich the global economy, forAfrica at least, has moved fromthe dominance of Washington andthe West to a new series oflinkages with these new giants.The essays raise questions aboutthe extent to which this ‘southernconsensus’ is actually capable ofmeaningful negotiations, so thatthe outcomes are beneficial toAfrican countries as much as theIndian and Chinese privatecompanies, state-ownedenterprises and governmentagencies.

The material is divided intothree sections: a general overview,the role of natural resources,particularly oil, and the impact ofinvestment in manufacturing.Case studies include work fromAngola, Zambia, Ghana and theDemocratic Republic of the Congo.In several cases it is clear thatthe relationship between theoutside powers and the nationalgovernments is blurred throughthe fact that that the local rulersthemselves have been moreinterested in profit taking than innational development. Thus itremains difficult to arrive at asatisfactory evaluation of theimpact of the Indian and Chineseinvestment. Furthermore, anumber of writers comment on thedynamic nature of the relationshipas these economic giants shifttheir strategies in line with global


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Reviewsdevelopment and their ownrequirements.

This book is useful as anadjunct to undergraduate coursesdealing with global developmentand Africa. However, the bookdoes not give a clear overallpicture of Chinese and Indianinvolvement as there is noindication of the relativeimportance of this process ineach country. The case studiesare useful but with so muchmaterial emerging on reliablewebsites and the fluidity of theprocess the printed information issoon out of date.Don FunnellUniversity of Sussex

Mapping AmericaFrank Jacobs and Fritz KesslerLondon: Black Dog Publishing,2010240pp, 24.5x29.5cmHb: £24.95ISBN 978-1-907317-08-8This book is a successor toMapping England, reviewed inGeography in 2009 (Vol 94, Part3). Whether or not the two heralda planned series of maps ofcountries is not stated but, on thisevidence, I hope so. Though itsobjectives are difficult toencapsulate, Mapping America isdifferent from other recent bookson the cartography of NorthAmerica. Its distinctiveness is inthe selection of the more than120 maps reproduced – almosthalf of which were published orcreated after 1999 – and in theshort texts accompanying them.Written by authors who betweenthem have published a book oncartographic curiosities, maintainthe ‘Strange Maps’ web-blog andedit the journal CartographicPerspectives, with its focus oncurrent information for map usersand map educators, theseextended captions are not merelyinformative: many challenge andsome provoke.

The book will fascinate thoseinterested in small-scale thematicmaps. Mainly of the USA, they plotsuch things as churches bydenomination, tornado activity,abortion providers and 26 millionindividual road segments. Asgeographers continue to abandontheir former paramount interest indifferences from place to place,this book could help to stem that

drift. Artists and graphic designerswith no previous interest in mapswill be stimulated by some of thegridless, nameless andboundaryless patterns, e.g. dailyflight patterns. For those withpersonal experience of NorthAmerica some maps will revivememories. Jack Kerouac’s sketchmap of his hitchhikings across thewest in 1947 reminded me ofmine of less than a decade later.

The absence of an indexmakes the book difficult to useconstructively and the weak spinewill reduce its shelf life.Nevertheless, it deserves a placein any library serving geographers,graphic designers and students ofrecent North American history.G. Malcolm LewisSheffield

The Framed World:Tourism, tourists andphotographyEdited by Mike Robinson andDavid PicardFarnham: Ashgate, 2009263pp, 16x24cmHb: £60.00ISBN 978-0-7546-7368-2Despite the millions of holiday-snaps and professional tourism-related photographs that areproduced and distributed everyday, relatively little academicresearch has been published onthe subject of tourism andphotography. This book thereforefills a significant gap in the field oftourism studies and will appeal toa wide audience includinggeography students, historians,anthropologists, sociologists andcultural theorists.

The editors justify therationale and scope of the textclearly in their introduction. Theirdesire to bring together acollection of essays that focus onthe social and cultural processesof production of both mass tourist‘holiday-snaps’ and the moreprofessionally produced tourismindustry photography is to beapplauded. They provide a conciseaccount of the historicaldevelopment of tourism relatedphotography and an accessibleoverview of the cultural theoriesand concepts most commonlyused to deconstruct and interpretthese visual discourses of traveland tourism.

There are 13 research essaysby contributors from a wide rangeof academic disciplines, includingtourism studies, anthropology,archaeology, music and theology.Some essays are far broader inscope and more conceptual thanothers (for example, chapter 6presents an excellent criticalhistorical perspective onphotographing race, and chapter14 discusses the application ofphenomenological perspectives totourism and photography). Thesecould have been grouped togetherat the start to provide a broaderhistorical and theoretical contextfor the subject area, with the morenarrowly focused case-studypapers coming later. Despite theobvious ‘intersections andoverlaps and overlays’ betweenchapters, there is no grouping ofthem into coherent sections. Thisgeneral complaint aside, the bookcontains some fascinatingresearch papers, most of whichapply post-colonial perspectivesand critical theory to reveal theissues of power, identity andrepresentation inherent in touristphotography. Almost withoutexception the chapters are writtenin an accessible and engagingstyle which should appeal to awide variety of readers.

The geographical coverage isquite broad with case studies onNew Mexico, Greece, Indonesia,central Africa, Taiwan, Britain andAustralia. However, when weconsider the spatial concentrationof tourist traffic in north-westEurope, the consumption of morepopular tourist sites andexperiences is arguably under-represented. A further omission isthe phenomenal rise in significanceof mobile and online technologiesin the production and almostinstantaneous dissemination ofphotographs using internet-basedsocial networking sites. Theabsence of any significant researchon tourism and photography incyberspace leaves the book lookingsomewhat dated and out of touchwith the tourist gaze of manypotential younger readers. Despitethese reservations this is still anexcellent book containing severalhigh quality snap-shots of acaptivating area of study.Graham MowlNorthumbria University

Top Spec GeographySeries Editors: Bob Digby and Sue WarnPrice: £14.99 (GA members*)

£19.99 (non-members) or buy six of thesame title for theprice of five! These cutting-edgeresources for post-16 studentsinvestigate specialistgeography topicsfrom the AS/A2specifications andhelp bridge the gapbetween A-level anduniversity.

Flood Risk and ManagementThis book will help students understand the nature and causes offlooding. It offers contemporary and original case studies todemonstrate the impacts river flooding has on the environmentand humans.

The Rapidly Changing ArcticStudents explore the physical systems of the Arctic regionincluding the role of climate and ice in influencing the area’secology and landforms. It also discusses the predicted impacts ofclimate change on the region.

Also available: Health Issues in Geography and Emerging Superpowers: India and China

New GA secondary resources

Postcard packsPrice: £10.99 (GA members*)

£15.99 (non-members)

‘Geography gives youoptions’ leafletsPrice: £7.99 (GA members*)

£11.99 (non-members)These attractive A5 leaflets, which come inpacks of 60, explain what geography has tooffer students, including ideas for possiblecareers and links for further guidance.Great for promoting geography as anEBacc subject or for use at options time.

GCSE Geography Teachers’Toolkit

Series Editors: Ruth Totterdell andJustin WoolliscroftPrice: £10.99 (GA members*)

£15.99 (non-members)This series is designed to help teachers take a fresh look at GCSEgeography and enthuse, engage and motivate students to think andact as geographers. Each title contains ten fully-resourced lessons.GCSE geography uptake looks set to increase as students strive toattain the EBacc – show them how exciting geography can be!

Available June 2011:Hot and Bothered? A study of climate changeThis title tackles the controversial issue of climate change byreinforcing students’ understanding and investigating the issue at arange of scales.

A Disposable Future? A study of our wasteful worldThis book looks at waste production in the UK and elsewhere byconsidering energy production, energy waste and the use ofrenewable/non-renewable fuels.

Life on the Edge? A study of extreme environmentsThis unit looks at the extreme environments which bring awe andwonder into geography lessons. It engages students with places verydifferent from where they live.

Available now: Is the Future Sussed?, Going Global? and For Richer and Poorer?

Each pack contains 96 postcards with eight different eye-catching,geographical designs.

* applies to Group, Full Personal and Concessionary members only

Place your order:• By phone: 0114 296 0088• By fax: 0114 296 7176• By email: [email protected]• Online: www.geography.org.uk/shop• By post: The Geographical Association,

160 Solly Street, Sheffield S1 4BF

IB Geography –Reflecting on the ‘new’ syllabusLondon Friday 24 June 2011

This CPD course will help post-16 teachers, both newand experienced, reflect upon the demands of the IBgeography diploma programme. The ‘new’ 2009–2017syllabus will have completed its first cycle in thesummer of 2011. This one-day course will provide anexcellent opportunity for teachers to reflect upon thefirst cycle and make plans for the next.

Full programme and online booking available atwww.geography.org.uk/IBgeography

Excellent teaching,excellent resultsPost-16 National ConferenceLondon Monday 20 June 2011Sheffield Monday 27 June 2011

Welcome to the Geographical Association’s secondnational conference for A-level geography teachers, thisyear jointly run with RGS-IBG. This conference isdesigned to update your knowledge of current topics,offer ways to challenge your students to think moregeographically and, ultimately, enhance your A-levelteaching with new ideas.

These conferences are run jointly with

Full programme and online booking available atwww.geography.org.uk/p16conference

Keep an eye on www.geography.org.uk for further information

Bespokeconsultancyservice

Work with a GA consultant to enhancegeography in your schoolDo you need support with curriculumplanning, preparing resources, knowledge andskills progression or judging and improvingyour teaching?

Tell us what you need and we’ll pair youwith a primary or secondary consultant whocan give you the support you require at a timeand date that suits you.

The whole process can take as long as youneed it to, from a half day session targeting aspecific issue to a series of regular consultantvisits taking you through a structuredimprovement plan until you reach your goals.

Tailoredtraining days

Take advantage of a focusedCPD day on your choice of topicThe GA’s tailor-made CPD days areideal for training a group of teachersin your own school.

The course content is completelyflexible – tell us what you’re workingto improve and our trainers willcreate a bespoke programme for you.

Our team will come to you so youdon’t need to pay travel expenses orsupply cover costs and you couldsave even more money by joiningforces with other schools to create alocal training day.

Interactiveonlinecourses

Practical, focused CPD from thecomfort of your own computerStarting in summer 2011, we’ll beoffering an extensive programme ofonline courses on topics like GIS,fieldwork, coasts, rivers and ESD.

The courses take place live in auser-friendly online training roomwhere you can watchdemonstrations, read documents andchat with the presenter.

There are no set up costs and nocomplicated software – all you needto get involved is a computer,speakers and an internet connection.

New from the GA for 2011–12

GeographyContentsEditorial: A world of differencePeter Jackson for the Editorial Collective

The living city: Thirdspace and the contemporarygeography curriculumRichard Bustin

The origins and development of geography fieldworkin British schoolsVictoria Ann Cook

Ecotourism in Amazonian Peru: uniting tourism,conservation and community developmentJennifer L. Hill and Ross A. Hill

Football, place and migration: foreign footballers inthe English Premier LeagueDavid Storey

Challenging AssumptionsWake up and smell the masala: contested realities inurban IndiaCarl Lee

Spotlight on ... Waste: Uncovering the global foodscandalAnna Krzywoszynska

Obituary: Rex Ashley WalfordMichael Morrish

ReviewsEdited by Hedley Knibbs

ISSN 0016-7487

The Geographical Association is a registered charity: no. 1135148

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