Place and Identity  in an Age of Technologically Regulated Movement    Call   Description   Meeting Report   VARENIUS HOME

LEADERS:

• Michael Curry (Geography, UCLA) ,
• Munroe Eagles (Political Science and NCGIA, SUNY Buffalo)

The nation-state is rather new, but identity and boundaries have always been related, just because identity-formation involves the differentiation of oneself or one's group from others.  Indeed, the nation-state has been but one particularly powerful of these geographically bounded communities, and identities are often the result of a complex nesting of place-based identities, overlain with non-place-based ones.  Still, the nation-state has promoted a powerful image of identity, as something that can be described in terms of borders in a landscape and lines on a map. And even though there have always been forces and pressures--in the form of alternatives such as religion, race, class, and even the corporation to challenge the association between place and identity, geographically-based forms of identity have remained important, even central, in the lives of most people.

But with the advent of modern communication technologies, apparent alternatives to place-based identity systems have become increasingly visible.  Indeed, the Internet or cyberspace has been touted by many as constituting the most far-reaching challenge yet to the strength and persistence of place-based identity. Unfortunately, in the popular literature it is often overlooked that the Internet and the dramatically increased flow of ideas has emerged within a larger context, of the unprecedented flow of people and goods.  Where these flows have crossed local, regional, and national  boundaries, they have been accompanied by the development of institutions designed to regulate them, and by the increasing ability to track goods, people and information.  The interaction of these phenomena increasing amounts of mobile information, the increased flows of goods and people, and the rise of new mechanisms for the regulation of each raises interesting questions about the future of geographically based identities.

Place is a basic and endearing geographical concept, and the prospect that it needs to be rethought as a result of new information technologies in general, and geographic information and geographic information technologies in particular, poses a basic research challenge. Key questions include:

• What have been the traditional means for the regulation of borders?  In what ways have they been successful in promoting territorially-based identities?
• How has the development of modern communications and especially geographical technologies altered the regulation of flows of people, goods, and information?
• To what extent has the regulation of borders at various scales from neighborhood to nation state and beyond moved away from geographical borders, and been replaced by ubiquitous forms of control?
• How are these various regulatory regimes related to personal and group identity?
• How have alternative, non-place-based identities been promoted and maintained?
• How have they been controlled, and how successful have these controls been?
• What lessons relevant to the world of the Internet can be learned from these experiences?
• What future is there for borders and boundaries in a world where there is no there?