1. The Power of Place By Harm De Blij
Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape

2. Preface
Thomas Friedman
Harm De Blij

4. The World is Flat (Globalization) The Power of Place (Localization)
Mobility / time /space compression or convergence with shrinking functional distances
The Earth, physically as well as culturally is very rough terrain with staggering situational differences
Interconnected transportation/communication
Regional compartments trap billions with uneven distribution of natural resources
Free trade
Durable cultures/local traditions
Migration is ubiquitous
Global core walling off affluent realms
Flow of ideas, money and jobs
The inequity of the Core / Periphery
“place” is history
Males and females in the same place have widely varying experiences
States try to join in unions (supranational organizations)
Devolution / balkanization regions nurture nationalism
Near-global diffusion of the English language / Western pop culture /corporations forms a cloak of conformity
Place of birth is a powerful influence over the destinies of billions
Join and you will enjoy the benefits
Most will die close to where they were born
Don’t join and fall off the edge
Globals vs. Locals

5. Globals, Locals, and Mobals (Chapter 1)

6. What deck or cabin do you first occupy on Cruiseship Earth?
Where The Garb
Speak The Language
Profess The Faith
Share The Health Conditions
Absorb The Education
Acquire The Attitudes
Inherit The Legacy or “Baggage” of Place

7. Locals – Globals - Mobals
Poorest
(Traditional)
Wealthiest
(High Mass Consumption)
Risk-takers in a rapidly urbanizing world
Least mobile
Very mobile
Migrants willing to leave the familiar
Most susceptible to the impress of place
“Place” is history
Legal migrants to undocumented border crossing
Population increasing 1.46% annually
Population growing at 0.25% annually
transnational
Top 48 most poverty-stricken countries are growing at 2.4% rate (700 million people)
Populations of Germany and Japan are declining!
Agents of change that challenge the power of place (they carry with them the assets and liabilities of locality)
Stage 2 or 3 in Demographic Transition Model
Stage 4 in the Demographic Transition Model
They are not refugees

8. A Nation Asunder Do Globals control the fates of Locals and Mobals?
The relationship between Globals and Locals will determine the future of the planet!
Globals build security and migration barriers
Globals mobilize armies to intervene in other states
Globals outsource for profit motives
Do Globals control the fates of Locals and Mobals?

9. Apartheid
The formalization of a set of practices that had long prevailed in South Africa but had never been codified as national policy

10. Apartheid
In the still-colonial era of the 1940s, South Africa was a microcosm of the world

11. Apartheid
A white minority had established the political, economic, and social frameworks that constituted the state

13. Apartheid
Black workers toiled in gold and diamond mines, on farms, and on public projects; whites had appropriated the means of production as well as most of the good farmland

14. Apartheid
The architects of apartheid were Afrikaners and English speaking South Africans. They were the Globals, driving along good highways linking all-white city centers and upscale suburbs, and controlling internal African migration in accordance with labor requirements

16. Apartheid
South Africa’s Locals were the African peoples who found themselves circumscribed by political boundaries the Europeans laid out. Several of them were nations more numerous than their white rulers: Zulus, Xhosa, Sotho, and Tswana. All of them had historic homelands; all had distinctive cultures and traditions. They were the most Local of Locals

17. Nelson Mandela President of South Africa 1994-1999 Leader of the ANC
Convicted in 1962, he will serve 27 years in prison

18. Nelson Mandela
The key figure in South Africa’s essentially peaceful transition to majority government. A new multiracial government has taken the reins. New challenges from an army of millions of Mobals is transforming cities and towns. South Africa has still not yet crossed the Rubicon.

19. A World Apart
Formal Apartheid from South Africa is dead, however, the incentives that gave rise to the system lives on in our cultural landscapes.
Gated Communities and the gap between rich and poor countries of the world

20. The Global Core vs. Periphery
The Periphery
MDC, First World, The Haves
LDC, Third World, The Have- Not's
High quality-of-life
Low quality of life
Slow growing population
Faster-growing population
Economic powers
Export oriented
15% of world’s population
85% of world’s population
75% of world’s annual income
25% of world’s annual income
The world is “Flattest” in the core
The world is “roughest” in the periphery
Attracts Mobals (a destination)
A source of migrants
Must control/regulate immigration
Affected by colonialism and imperialism

23. Israel
700 kilometers of fences, concrete and walls . Here the objective is security against terrorism rather than migration

24. DMZ (Demilitarized Zone)
Built in 1953
250-kilometer fenced fortification, four kilometers wide and very heavily guarded.

25. Today it symbolizes the world’s core- periphery partition

26. Place and Destiny
There is nothing unique about Afrikaners seeking to protect their advantages, their way of life, and culture. From Han-ruled China to Sunni-dominated Iraq it has been done for centuries

27. The State
Toward the end of the 20th century, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and Yugoslavia collapsed, many foresaw the demise of the state as the key player in international affairs. It would be replaced by supranational blocs such as the European Union and subnational units like Catalonia

28. Catalonia

29. The planet’s sole superpower
Five factors that lead to a countries collapse
Environmental damage
Natural forces of climate change
Behavior of hostile neighbors
Weakening of trading partners/allies
Their response to these problems
Jared Diamond

30. An Enduring Human Geography

31. An Enduring Human Geography
The diffusion of modern humanity begins in Africa. It will lead to plant and animal domestication in the fertile, watered river basins that attracted growing numbers of people. A settlement pattern will begin to emerge, roughly 10,000 years ago.

33. An Enduring Human Geography
A map of world population represents a durable demographic layout, much of it forged early and then sustained by local expansion far more than by regional location. China had the world’s largest population a thousand years ago it still does today.

34. “World Island” Halford Mackinder 1904

35. The Greatest distributional changes over the past millennium occurred not on the “World Island” consisting of Eurasia and Africa, but in the human outposts of the Americas and Australia, where Europeans overpowered and decimated earlier arrivals (even today, the World Island’s human population exceeds the rest of the world by 5.4 to 1.3 billion)

36. 3 phases of human geographic dispersal
Ancient emigration from Africa and occupation of productive Old-World environments
Recent penetration of the New World by European emigrants “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
Recent explosion of global population (nearly 6 billion people in the last 100 years)

37. Models, Mobals, and Migration

38. Migrants and Motives

39. Migrants and Motives

40. A Barricaded World Samuel Huntington

41. The Imperial Legacy of Language
Chapter 2