What is “proximate” now is very different from when the field of Geography was first forged. While there is a literature around the compression of space and time that has occurred due to innovations in transportation, communications, and larger trends in globalization, the field of Geography lags in its mainstream appreciation of the more modern manifestations of this phenomena - sometimes called, connectography, cyber-social geography, and digital/physical convergence. And, there are no organized communities, resources, or curriculum available for the wider community of Geographers and practitioners to lean on in order to bring these phenomena to the center of our discussions about the modern world. Simply put, Geography has a role to play to help the larger world grapple with the meaning and implications of “proximity” in the 21st Century.
Under funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and The Tow Foundation, the American Geographical Society (AGS) is building an inclusive community of scholars and practitioners, open source knowledge resources, and structured curriculum that would help advance this way of thinking within baccalaureate and post-baccalaureate Geography levels, in a way that also drives these concepts into public and private sector thinking and practice. The net result of this effort would be to reassert the role of Geography and geographic analysis in both public and private sector strategy, decision making, and investment in a modern world where new hybrid forms of proximity are reshaping our politics, economics, social movements, geopolitics, conflict, and more.
The Thesis
For all of human history, every war that was fought, every good that was traded, every social movement to change the world, happened on geographic terrain. Innovations in transport and infrastructure brought different parts of the world closer together over the centuries - compressing space and time, and forever altering how some (though hardly all) experienced the world around them. When the telegraph was invented, it was as though humankind punched a hole in the universe, short circuiting the laws of space and time, allowing communications to span the world in near real time, changing the course of history. These network connections, whether communications or physical networks, have driven a process we call “connectography”, where the connections themselves come to reshape our human geography, and in turn our physical and biogeography. Now, of course, most of us are connected to anyone we choose to be, through those little devices in our pocket called Smartphones. And, with the dawn of social media, these phones connect us to communities of like minded individuals, or at least communities of individuals with common interests. This means that there is little in modern life that is not conducted over this so-called “cyber-social terrain”, rather than merely geographic terrain. Warmaking, commerce, social movements are all now mediated through, and sometimes even instigated over, this global cyber-social geography. This means that people who are geographically distant may be highly proximate in terms of their social bonds, the narratives that they adhere to, and the kinds of action they undertake or demand of others. This new reality means that knowledge and information, as well as misinformation/disinformation and automated inauthentic expression, suddenly find their way to the center of the world of Geography, reshaping our realities of how we understand the world around us. And with the digital/physical convergence occurring, these cyber-social connections and other forms of human ingenuity are being projected into the emerging Metaverse, and in turn back into our physical, geographically-grounded, augmented reality. Indeed, proximity means something very different now than it did when the field of Geography was established.
This does not mean that geographic proximity is no longer a factor. Indeed, depending on the instance, geographic proximity and the ‘fixity’ of geographic phenomenon are still relevant.. Yet, today we can only understand what is going on in geographic terrain by first understanding the cyber-social terrain that it intersects. Simply put, what is proximate now is very different from when the field of Geography was first forged. And, this means that investment is needed to bring this clarified definition what proximity means in the 21st century to all fields of endeavor that could benefit.
Conceptual Foundations
These concepts are not entirely new, but have long gone underappreciated or misunderstood, achieving more prominence only in recent years. Some of these concepts have been accepted as truisms, while adherents have been left with no formal education on the mechanics of how they work together. Students, citizens, business and government leaders have been denied a very important conceptual toolbox required for navigating and leading the modern world. The conceptual building blocks include:
Time-Space Compression: In recent decades, Geographers have provided foundational concepts on how transport, communications and globalization more broadly have compressed space and time in ways that fundamentally change how we understand and interact with our world. The work of Professors David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Barney Warf are notable contributions that need to be understood as contributions from geographers.
Network Proximity: A number of disciplines have recognized the importance of network proximity in shaping the behavior of individuals and organizations. Some have come from the world of Sociology, with the foundational work of Professors Harrison White, Ronald Burt and others that laid the foundation of computational network Sociology. Other work has come from technical origins, characterizing telecommunications networks and the like, and their impact on communication, media distribution and the impact on societies. Professor Nicole Starosielski’s work on the historic impact of undersea communications cables is an exemplar.
Connectography: The work of AGS Councilor Dr. Parag Khanna on how networks reshape real world geography over time has led to his neologism - “connectography.” However, this work has been more focused on physical network connections, though all these networks (including telecommunications networks) facilitate social proximity in new and powerful ways.
Cyber-Social Geography: Twenty-five years ago, the AGS published a special issue of the Geographical Review, edited by Barney Warf and Paul Adams, dedicated to Cyberspace and Geographical Space (1997). Today, the work of AGS Fellow Dr. John Kelly on how humanity’s online behaviors have come to form a kind of cyber-social terrain of enduring social relationships that now shape how our world works, and how we experience our world, constitutes a new dimension to Geography. This cyber-social geography can be characterized quantitatively with rigor at hyper-local, regional, national, and global scales - and all of the world’s online expression across and through this networked terrain can be understood in realtime and retrospectively in terms of change over time.
Digital/Physical Convergence: Increasingly, geospatial technologists, scholars and policymakers discuss the potential of Digital Twins. But, this is part of a larger free flow between digital designs and physical manifestations that has been transforming many fields of practice. Think of designing a digital twin of a city/building in order to hasten the stakeholder process, and then accelerating the build process in the real world with Smart Construction techniques that benefit from supply chains that are coded to Building Information Models (BIM). AGS Fellow Nadine Alameh, CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium, has been a leader in much of this. Think of designing a product and rather than manufacturing it and shipping the finished good, you send the CAD file and have it 3D printed on site. The Metaverse/Virtual Reality is another such example where you either scan real world objects and project them into a virtual world, or build a geodetically correct rendition of the real world, collected by sensors in the real word, and project it in the Metaverse and then meet with collaborators there to plan, rehearse, learn about, or enjoy something without traveling to that place. This is also true with taking data collected about the real world from digital sources, and projecting them with geographic accuracy and precision into your real world experience with augmented reality.
These conceptual building blocks are not entirely unfamiliar to most Geographers, but this is not how Geography is taught at the baccalaureate and graduate level. It is time that we bring these conceptual foundations into the core practice and pedagogy of Geography in a way that helps government and business re-center a new generation of geographic thinking in how they prosecute their mission/business. The Proximity Project will build upon these conceptual building blocks, and curate a series of concepts from various fields of practice and various disciplines to build bridges between them and these core geographic concepts.
Broad Areas of Application to Be Considered
21st century reformulations of the meaning and experience of proximity can only be understood when exploring real-world areas of application and fields of endeavor. The Proximity Project has marshaled experts from many sectors of society, many fields of endeavor, with diverse experiences to help rethink what proximity means in the 21st century.
All Politics are Local: This old adage from former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, is considered a truism, yet our emerging experience with automated, inauthentic expression within the cyber-social geographic neighborhoods that our politics are nested suggests a new kind of “proximity” is critical to the future well being of our democracy. With many nation-states and transnational groups now flocking to social media platforms, overtly and covertly, as a way of shaping their adversaries’ domestic narratives, we are forced to move beyond the age old geographic considerations of local politics and GeoPolitics. The nexus between domestic “freedom of speech” issues and malign foreign influence can only be understood with a proper grasp of the role of proximity in the 21st century. AGS Fellow Dr. John Kelly, and his new lens of “cyber-social geography” helps make sense of this new world. The ultimate goal of this dialog would be to convene political leaders, thinkers, commentators, operators, and citizens to shine a light on the latest incarnation of politics’ ever changing relationship with proximity.
The Long Haul and the Last Mile: With a revolution in mobility technologies and business models, as applied to both freight and human mobility, is rapidly changing how we think of both the long haul and the last mile. AGS Fellow Dean Wise has become a leader in discussions of “the New Proximity” which are actively discussed within heavy industry, yet there is no one place where the changing space-time geometry of logistics and passenger travel is discussed and accounted for.
Remotely Controlled Operations: The same way many manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other continents, with positive control exerted remotely, the 21st century will see more remote controlled business operations of all kinds. From manufacturing to field operations to to Smart Construction, to GIG economy entrepreneurs, etc. The more our digital representations of remote physical and geographic environments become higher resolution, timely, precise and accurate, our ability to execute such remote controlled operations - either with humans or autonomous platforms - will will increase. This trend, for good or for bad, seems inexorable. AGS Fellow Dr. Mike Botts is eloquent in discussing how all systems on earth (whether, Sensors, Things, Robots, control systems, devices and platforms in space, air, land, sea, and cyberspace) are becoming increasingly connected, location-enabled and geographically aware and what this might mean for the future of remote controlled and even autonomous operations.
Proximity and the Future of Work: The development of the Living Wage Calculator by AGS Councilor and MIT Professor Amy Glasmeier is an example of a solution to a major challenge for employers - how to calculate a living wage for employees of business operations that exist in different regions with very different cost basis for living. As the workforce becomes more and more global, and can increasingly work remotely, how should we think about living wages when employees undertaking the same tasks are living in radically different geographical locations? Convening employers and public officials around this topic could shine a light on issues of economic inequality, diversity, equity, inclusion, and employment justice.
Immigration and Transnational Networks: Already social media has created transnational networks that span diaspora communities, wherever they have immigrated. As AGS Councilor Parag Khanna says in his book “MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us” - the map of humanity is not settled - not now, not ever. “As climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize, and technology disrupts, we’re entering a new age of mass migrations - one that will scatter both the dispossessed and the well off”. Yet, this reshuffling will also build durable transnational networks that will challenge our existing concepts of proximity. A dialog focused on proximity in the 21st century would elevate the discussion above the existing retrograde narratives around immigration.
Geopolitical Perspectives on Remoteness and Proximity: Many factors are reshaping the geopolitical landscape, ranging from the impacts of cyber-social geography to the dynamics of globalization, to continuing struggles over territory and space. Tangible geographical circumstances and traditional elements of proximity still matter, in many cases challenging sources of entropy that are undermining longstanding geopolitical arrangements. But the forces that are altering what counts as proximate matter as well. As new forms of connectivity upend geopolitics in the 21st century, we need to move beyond a focus on “geographic determinism” in the traditional sense. Instead, we need to consider how emerging geopolitical mindsets and associated spatial configurations of power—whether nearby or distant—are remaking the geopolitical contours of our world.
‘Glocal’ Climate Change: AGS Councilor Robin Leichenko examines how and why processes of global economic and environmental change differentially affect cities, regions and sectors, and the implications of these processes for questions of vulnerability, equity, and sustainability. Her book, Climate and Society: Transforming the Future, explores social causes, consequences, and responses to climate change, and identifies openings and opportunities to create a more equitable and sustainable future. Economic vulnerability and resilience to climate change; economic and social equity implications of climate change impacts and adaptation; and the interplay between global change processes and local processes such as housing markets, and urban spatial development all depend on new interpretations of proximity in the 21st century. Leichenko serves as Review Editor for Working Group II of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Engaging the Proximity Project’s conceptual toolbox in such discussions could help ground action on climate change at local, regional and global scales.
Health, Wealth and Place: AGS Councilor Dee Jordan explores infectious diseases and their spread around the world. Other health crises, such as the opioid crisis, have been proven to spread socially in ways that conform with contagion models. WIth increased connectedness in terms of growing urbanization, global plane travel, and supply chain integration, we find more and more people proximate to health threats of all kinds. In some cases, this increased proximity means faster spread of infectious disease or spread of social contagions. It can also mean concentrations of health and wealth that serve as a bulwark (think herd immunity) against disease and social contagion.
New Proximity of Food: Humanity has experienced several agricultural revolutions over 10,000 years - each changing the proximity of populations to their sources of sustenance. Presently, local food landscapes are nested within complex regional and global food supply chains that often make our relationship with the sources of our very food security quite remote. However, locavore movements, indoor farming, alternative protein fermentation processes, and other technologies stand to fundamentally change our geographic relationship with our food yet again. AGS Councilor Antoinette Winkler-Prins is a scholar of urban agriculture and food landscapes, and served on the program committee of the AGS’s Geography2050: The Future of Food - a living dialog that will continue within the Proximity Project as we imagine the ways in which we need our food sources to be proximate in the 21st century.
Proximity and the Future of Privacy: Privacy used to be reinforced by remoteness. Privacy was harder to maintain from those who were most proximate to your life. While this may continue to be true in general, the ubiquity of location technologies and the resulting erosion of location privacy is actively redefining what proximity means in the 21st century. Your most intimate moments are now so easily intelligible to remote observers that you don’t even know, as your space-time fingerprint becomes available to others. AGS Fellow Stacey Gray, who is the Senior Director for U.S. Policy at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), will share her insights on the latest in location privacy legislation and policy in the US and around the world.
Augmenting Reality with Proximate Insights: The ability to augment our reality across geographic space and time stands to fundamentally change how we experience proximity and social interaction in space and time. As more and more of humanity’s collective knowledge is digitized and georeferenced, it can be localized as insights that are proximate to one’s lived experience via augmented reality. As digital data about real world places are collected and curated with geographic accuracy and precision, they can be projected into your real-world experience with augmented reality. Without this, so much local knowledge can be lost to obscurity, left difficult to find, use and properly understand when you need it, where you need it. Pokemon Go is a great example of how communities have formed around collective experiences that do not exist in the real world, but which become proximate when a preferred technology platform determines it should. AGS Fellow Camille Francois, the head of Trust and Safety at Niantic, has a front row seat to this transformation in the proximity in knowledge about places, and how it will evolve with augmented reality.
Reality’s Collision Course with the Metaverse: Geography is shifting again as the Metaverse sparks a new digital land rush. Real world geography is colliding with cyber-social geography which is again colliding with a new geography of the Metaverse. No one knows where this is going, yet it is clear that any such manifestation will require a fundamental rethink of “proximity” as a concept. At the center of all this is AGS Fellow Patrick Cozzi, shaping the future of the Metaverse Standards Forum. The “technology and society” implications are potentially enormous as the major platforms decide how they will “go to market” in the Metaverse. Our role as citizens versus consumers versus creatives versus netizens will reshape our basic understandings of proximity and geography.
Building the Proximity Project Conceptual Toolbox
Experts, innovators and practitioners from each of these fields of endeavor are joining the Proximity Project to share their insights and experiences with evolving notions of proximity in the 21st century. They are contributing their insights and experiences with compelling use cases, new vocabulary and concepts describing the changes to proximity that they have experienced, and connections to other thought leaders at the forefront of this change. The role of the Proximity Project is to surface, organize, and disseminate all of this knowledge so that citizens, practitioners, policymakers, and business leaders can better grapple with the challenges posed by shifting realities of proximity in the 21st century.
This effort will begin with a “snowball sample,” that will start with short 10-15 minute talks by AGS Councilors and AGS Fellows to introduce proximity related concepts and vocabulary from the discipline, industry, domain, or field of endeavor with which they are familiar, as well as experts and innovators that that they believe are doing ground breaking work that can help us better understand how our notions of proximity is changing in the 21st century. These talks will precipitate workshops, published and digital resources and outreach to communities that can benefit from these insights - whether business leaders, policymakers, practitioners, educators, or everyday citizens.
Workshop: Based on input from the snowball sample, the Proximity Project will convene a workshop composed of experts from government, industry, academe, and the social sector who grapple with the issues from a particular field of endeavor. These experts would help identify information resources that could be used, from different fields of endeavor (naturally, including academic literatures) to inspire a unique way for the field of Geography to inculcate undergraduate and graduate students with a new conceptual toolbox for wrestling with issues of proximity in the 21st century in ways that are relevant to wider fields of application across the public and private sectors. This workshop will help plant the seeds that will grow a larger community that will sustain this new way of thinking about proximity in the 21st century - a community that AGS can continue to convene over time in formal and informal settings.
Published and Digital Resources: One of the outputs from this inter-sectoral group would be to develop a special issue of the Geographical Review focused on finding from the Proximity Project. This volume can also be reproduced as a stand alone monograph for instructional use. Second, open source and open license course materials that can be created and/or curated for use by professors around the world in their undergraduate and graduate curricula. This could include video lectures and TEDTalk type content, as well as geographically-infused, and cyber-social geography PowerPoint materials and lecture notes that highlight important topics on proximity in the 21st century. This would include a mapping to Advanced Placement Human Geography requirements, for students taking baccalaureate level Geography courses while in high school.
Outreach to Departments and Decision Makers: Once these resources are built, the Proximity Project will continue its outreach to build advocacy in academic Geography departments, to encourage the adoption of this course content and this general way of thinking about proximity in the 21st century. Simultaneously, the AGS will begin outreach to private and public sector decision makers to help them better understand the implications of this new way of thinking about proximity in the 21st century, including the issuance of white papers and the holding of online seminars.
In the end, this new way of thinking about proximity in the 21st century, which fully embraces the frontier of thinking around cyber-social geography will become integral to geographic education and research. Just as the original foundation-sponsored work around the ethics of geospatial data and technology has resulted in the AGS’s standing EthicalGEO Initiative and the Locus Charter, this Proximity Project effort would become part of the DNA of the AGS which would serve as a platform for advancing this fundamentally different way of understanding space, technology, terrain, connectivity and community in the coming decades.
By reimagining what proximity means in the 21st century as it relates to these many fields of endeavor, we can help government, industry and our wider society get out in front of the grand challenges we face. Through the Proximity Project, the AGS will serve as a lighthouse for those navigating the complex, new, and ever evolving realities around proximity in how they manifest at local, regional, national, and global scales - and how they manifest functionally across different fields of human endeavor. The mission of the AGS is to be the foremost champion of geography for the benefit of society, the Proximity Project is another example of how we remain true to this mission.
For more information, contact us at:
Dr. John Konarski
Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Marie Price
President
Dr. Christopher Tucker
Chairman