The Dictionary of Human Geography

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increasingly frictionless, even ‘flat’ as

global travel and communication in-

creases, but in consequence ‘what was

once thought to be an experience of the

geographical world in its totality has been

re-proportioned into what is simply local’.

In sum, Dodgshon (1998, p. 117) insists,

time–space compression means that ‘cul-

turally,wearenowmoreawareoftimeand

spaceas dimensions that have extension’.

(2) In contrast, other writers treat time–space

expansion as thedualof time–space com-

pression. They recognize that power-

geometryis highly variable, and in par-

ticular that the power to compress dis-

tance is also often the power to expand

distance. The unidirectional logic of

time–space compression requires dis-

tance to contract under the spasmodic

compulsions of global capitalism to

reduce circulation time, but images of

‘the shrinking world’ have become so

powerful and pervasive that they can ob-

scure the ways in which, for millions of

people, the imperatives ofglobalization

can force their world to expand in ways

that threaten to become unbearable. Katz

(2001a) draws on her experience in

‘Howa’, a village in Sudan, to argue that:

From the vantage point of capital, the world

may be shrinking but, on the marooned

grounds of Howa, it appeared to be getting

bigger every day. After a gruelling decade

and a half ofstructural adjustmentsand

political upheaval in Sudan, people in Howa

survived by maintaining a semblance of the

patterns and practices of production that had

long sustained them. .. But this was only vi-

able now if carried out over an extended

physical arena. The terrain of social produc-

tion and reproduction had expanded from

perhaps five kilometres in 1980 to two hun-

dred kilometres by 1995, the distance men

routinely travelled to participate in the char-

coal trade. Time–space expansion also

represented a transformation of the old con-

stellation of activities that involved men’s

long absences from the village. People still

farmed (but also worked as agricultural la-

borers up to a hundred kilometres away),

keptanimals(by sending them out with re-

latives to distant pastures) and cut wood (but

now in areas of the South targeted for defor-

estation as part of the northern government’s

wareffort). (Katz, 2001, p. 1224)

For Katz, therefore, ‘time–space expan-

sion embraces, reworks and plays into the

altered geographies ofglobalization’.

Contemporary capitalism involves dialect-

ical torsions of time–space compression

and time–space expansion (seedialectic)

that produce spirals of advantage and

marginalization: ‘If in one way the known

world expanded for people in Howa, in

others their place in it receded as their village

was increasingly marginalized’ (p. 1225).

Time–space expansion happens not only

within a relative space punctuated by the

differential geographies of time–space com-

pression, however, but also through the prolif-

erating partitions of an intrinsically colonial

modernity. ‘If global capitalism is aggres-

sivelyde-territorializing, moving ever outwards

in a process of ceaseless expansion and furi-

ously tearing down barriers to capital accumu-

lation, then colonial modernity is intrinsically

territorializing, forever installing partitions

between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’’ (Gregory, 2004a,

p. 253). Those who live under military occu-

pation (seeoccupation, military) know this

very well, as they are caught in curfews or

lockdowns and wait in line at checkpoints:

timeseems to stop, punctuated by one emer-

gency after another, and the ordinary paths of

everyday lifeare blocked or redirected. In

occupied Palestine, for example, ‘as the illegal

settlements are wired ever more tightly into

Israel, Palestinians are made to undergo an

intensified spasm of time-space expansion:

families, friends and neighbours cut off

from one another; farmers separated from

their fields and their wells’ (Gregory, 2004c,

p. 604). Those who try to flee the politico-

economic deformations described by Katz and

the politico-military oppressions described by

Gregory are peculiarly vulnerable to the despair

of time–space expansion. ‘The globe shrinks

for those who own it,’ Bhabha (1992, p. 88)

remarks, but ‘for the displaced or the dispos-

sessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is

more awesome than the few feet across borders

or frontiers’ (cf. Hyndman, 1997: see also

migration;refugee). dg

topographic map A large- or intermediate-

scalemapdescribing the most important phys-

ical and cultural features of aplaceorregion.

Largely a product of national or provincial gov-

ernments, topographic maps support national

defence, economic development, environmen-

tal science and growth management as well as

providing data for compiling less detailed,

smaller-scale maps. Typically compiled from

aerial photography, they use contour lines (see

isoline) to describe the land surface and

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 761 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

TOPOGRAPHIC MAPTOPOGRAPHIC MAP