Abstract
How do transport systems develop, and how do they become ‘geo-political issues’? The present chapter attempts to answer these two questions by diving into the corpus of transport geography and presenting some of the key concepts, leading principles and commonly accepted ideas about transport systems which impact the practice of transport planners and decision-makers. Starting from the distinctions already established in the first chapter about political geography and geopolitics, the first section undertakes to situate ‘transport geopolitics’ within the framework of various disciplines. The section defines some key elements that belong to the terminology used by transport geographers and practitioners. The second section analyses the dominant geographical conception of human settlement and how its prevailing utilitarian assumptions, as well as some binary geographic concepts (rural/urban; core/periphery), have influenced the dominating transport planning narratives and policymaking. It is precisely this political dimension of transport that the third section tackles by identifying four kinds of meta-activities through which political control over transport systems is exercised. The conclusion of the chapter indicates a series of blind spots unseen by conventional utilitarian transport geography and emphasises the need for a structuralist and morphodynamical turn in the field of transport geopolitics.
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Notes
- 1.
It is, evidently, impossible to embark on an exhaustive comparative in-depth analysis of all competing and complementary theories to be found in transport geography scholarship and mobility studies. Rather, the chapter intends to capture and summarise some of the commonly accepted ideas about the morphogenesis of transport systems which influence transport planning practices and decision-making.
- 2.
This distinction will be developed further in Chap. 6.
- 3.
The conveyance of corpses is the object of some international agreements as for the Agreement on the Transfer of Corpse signed in 1973 and which entered in force in 1975 following an initiative of the European Council as an attempt to replace the International Convention on the Transport of Corpses from 1937. The treaty now has just over twenty signatories.
- 4.
It is interesting that the authors of the ‘Geography of Transport Systems’ do not evoke the political dimension of accessibility since to reach a position it is essential to have the authorisation to do so. As for mobility, accessibility is, in fact, a significant object of control which impacts the trajectories of actors. This aspect of political accessibility will be extensively discussed in Chap. 5.
- 5.
The term infrastructure is mainly used in the plural within this book better to evoke the plural characters of physical transport components.
- 6.
The founders of modern geography in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century have long insisted on the importance of geographical unity or what can be called general geography. In his work on comparative geography Ritter (1865: 16) recalled how geography “aims at nothing less than to embrace the most complete and the cosmic view of the Earth” while Vidal de la Blache (1913: 291), who believed that the task of geography was mainly descriptive, reminds that the discipline inherited the responsibility to “locate the various orders of natural and cultural facts, to determine exactly the position they occupy and the area they embrace […] and understand the correspondence and correlation between these facts”.
- 7.
The term ‘utilitarian’ in the present work does not refer to the ethical approach in moral philosophy, but refers to the idea that human action can be first motivated to fulfil vital needs, primal desires or what is deem as useful.
- 8.
- 9.
While dating from 2001, the criteria adopted by the Federal Highway Administration of United States, has also informed more recent guidelines Cf. U.S. Department of Transportation (FHA), 2016.
- 10.
The conceptual pair of ‘core-periphery’ has found different designations in the literature, for instance the concept of centre vs periphery often used in French or the concept of heartland vs. hinterland’(Stadel, 2009). The term of ‘core’ has some metaphorical advantages. as it refers to the old French ‘coeur’ which means ‘heart’. One may understand in the same time the concept of ‘heartland’, a term apparently appreciated by the classical tradition of political geography by reminding the role of the heart has a function. The word ‘periphery’ refers to the Greek ‘peripheria’ which involves the idea carrying ‘pherein’: ‘to carry’, and ‘peri’: ‘around/beyond’.
- 11.
Reynaud (1992: 600-605), who has discussed the core-periphery extensively, unsurprisingly recommend some precautions in the use of the binary concept, noticing that the ‘core and periphery’: i) are not in a geometric relation since the centre is not always in a middle of a geographical area; ii) are not absolute oppositions since they are relative and the gap between them may vary; iii) are not static but in evolution and must be understood in their long term development; iv) even if the periphery is associated with some kind of inequality toward the centre, it may not be felt since one can always be satisfied with the territorial context.
- 12.
Here is the long version of the definition: “[The] process of regulating and controlling the provision of transport to facilitate the efficient operation of the economic, social and political life of the country at the lowest social cost” (Tolley & Turton, 1995: 332).
- 13.
I have discussed these five dimensions while proposing to re-scope the notion of cross-border geopolitics in a paper simply entitled “Cross-Border Transport Geopolitics: a Scoping Review” (Ampleman, 2020).
- 14.
Memphis in Tennessee is also home to the general headquarters of FedEx, while Sandy Springs in Georgia is the base for UPS.
- 15.
The death of the young American preacher John Allen Chau in the autumn of 2018 and which is attributed to the Sentinelese after Chau tried to reach illegally the Island has been largely documented in the media (Sasikumar, 2018, 2019). The body of Chau has never been recovered despite the attempt by Indian authorities in India.
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Ampleman, L. (2021). On Transport Geography and Political Transportability (a Prevailing Starting Point). In: Transport Geopolitics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4967-7_3
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