Real Toy Trains

Today, workers who need to access railroad tracks for maintenance and repairs typically reach the work site in a utility truck that has been outfitted with an extra set of special HyRail guide wheels that allow it to follow the tracks.

Through much of the twentieth century, however, dedicated railcars were in common use for bringing small groups of workers to remote stretches of railroad. Like many people, I first became aware of them through images — often humorous — in movies and on television of the old, manual versions known as handcars or pump trolleys. As an undergraduate geographer and avid camper and hiker in the 1980s, I would often fantasize about getting some friends together with some old handcars, packing them with some camping equipment, and setting off for some unique cross-country experiences.

As an undergraduate geography student, I had learned that the United States reached its peak railroad mileage early in the twentieth Century, because nineteenth-century settlement policies had encouraged redundant tracks that were not economically viable in the long run. As railroads consolidated and became more competitive, the total amount of track in use declined steadily, even as the amount of shipping dramatically increased.  This gave me some hope that plenty of abandoned railroads would be available for exploration, and since most tracks have a very low topographic gradient, it would be an easy way to apply my strong interest in transects to otherwise little-known terrain. I never did actually find a handcar, and I also learned that when track is abandoned, it is usually removed in order to recycle the steel. Finding inactive track, therefore, is something that must be coordinated very carefully with active railroad operators!

In real life, I have still never seen the handcars, and I have only seen the motorized railcars  in Mexico. During a 1989 summer term at the University of the Americas Puebla, I enjoyed walking into the town of Cholula each day, often to climb the famous pyramid there. It was near the pyramid that I would occasionally see a group of workers zoom past me in a motorized railcar. (What looked like one pyramid, incidentally, was known locally as las piramides, as the original array of four pyramids was buried by a single, large one, which was in turn buried two more times before being capped by a Catholic cathedral in a most dramatic example of sequent occupance.) They would zip by quickly, before I had a chance to get a photo, so I started having my camera ready whenever I was at the crossing. As far as I was concerned, they were living out the dream of independent rail travel! My preparedness paid off, and I eventually got just this one shot of four men, sporting shiny hard hats and a red safety flag. They clearly were not on a camping trip, but they had looks of satisfaction and purpose; they knew they had the coolest vehicle in town!

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed almost two centuries ago, civil society in the United States is remarkably robust, with an organization to be found for even the seemingly most obscure interests. I should not have been surprised, therefore, to learn of a nationwide network of people interested in these fun little carts. The Boston Globe article Dreams realized, On a Small Scale was my introduction to NARCOA, the North American Railcar Operators Association. Its 1,800 members share advice on finding and maintaining the vehicles — the classified ads on the NARCOA web site are most enticing! Most importantly, NARCOA members organize excursions, for which they carefully assure that clear track is available.

The  Boston Globe article cited above describes such an excursion in New Hampshire, and the online version includes a video.  The video conveys two important things to me: first, this is a great way to explore landscapes, at a moderate speed and from a unique vantage point. Second, the movement of these little machines can be just as spritely as I remember from the Cholula encounters.

Suggested Activities

1. Topographic maps. Identify any section of train track on a USGS topographic map at 1:24,000 or 1:25,000 scale.  Look carefully at contour lines (and possibly benchmarks) to identify the elevation at each end of the section. Measure the length of the section and change in elevation to identify the average slope of the section.  Then, identify the elevation at regular intervals along the track in order to graph a vertical profile of the track. The vertical axis of the graph should be at a different scale than the horizontal axis, to provide vertical exaggeration.) Repeat the process with streams and roads in the same area, to see how much effort may have been made to minimize slopes on the railroad. If the railroad passes through hilly or mountainous terrain, look for evidence of road cuts in the contours.

2. Railroads. Railroad museums can be found in cities and towns throughout North America, and are excellent places to learn the historic geography of a region or of the whole continent. From single box cars preserved on a town green to major installations such as the B&O Railroad Museum or the Golden Spike National Historic Site, railroad museums provide insight into the economic geography of the past, as well as patterns of migration and vernacular landscapes. (A small, extraordinary example is the Children’s Holocaust Memorial in Tennessee, housed in a boxcar that had been used in the Holocaust.) Similarly, railroad hobbyists — from railcar owners to model collectors to trainspotters — have learned a lot about geography from the pursuit of their hobbies. Identify a museum and/or an association of railroad enthusiasts in your area, and pay a visit. Write a short essay about the local geography lessons you learn in the process.

Concept Caching: Rice Terraces – Bali, Indonesia

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Reflecting on the interdisciplinary nature of our discipline in the post Geography Directions: Geography in all directions: interdisciplinary research, Matt Ebiner’s exquisite photo of Balinese rice terraces illustrates the intersections of physical with human, technology with art, and humanity with “nature.”  Studying such landscapes necessitates interdisciplinary approaches to consider the long cultivated relationship between people and earth.  Geography is certainly the best suited discipline to balance, manage and succeed in such an interdisciplinary endeavor.  It is only a bonus that Geographers also get to enjoy such alluring environments.

Geography Directions: Geography in all directions: interdisciplinary research

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

A glance through the news stories that have featured on Geography Directions over the last fourteen months reveals a cacophony of topics, themes and stories beneath the heading “Geography”.  Physical geography is represented through posts concerning water management, waste, deforestation, and disaster geographies, while the human side of our discipline emerges through migration, urbanization, social exclusion and election issues.  Many of these topics are classified as sub-disciplines of geography (as taught in universities), but they also stretch across borders to other, separate disciplines; international relations, sociology, geology or biology, for example.  Our geographic discipline, it appears, can move in any direction, and thus may benefit from cross-border interdisciplinary research.

Interdisciplinary research is analysed critically in a forthcoming TIBG article by Dr Donovan (then a PhD geologist/geographer), Prof. Sidaway (geographer) and Dr Stewart (geologist).  These academics came together through the supervision of an ESRC/NERC studentship undertaken by Donovan (2010), and their article evaluates the journeys experienced between geology and geography, as well as the wider tensions and implications for interdisciplinary research.

The article is an empirical contribution to an evolving literature on interdisciplinary scholarship (Bracken & Oughton, 2009; Johnston, 2003) and offers a guide to the type of enabling conditions that should be in place (across university departments) to support such interdisciplinary work to a successful conclusion.  The rewards of such work can be great and I am certain that we can all be encouraged to think beyond our disciplinary boxes a little more.

by Fiona Ferbrache

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: The Flag of the European Union

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The European Union is truly a grand political, economic, social and cultural experiment.  Quite revolutionary for even a region of revolutions, the EU marks a fine line between inter-governmental and supra-national.  Complexity and compromise are what define the diplomatic-style interactions and the creation of cross-national policy.  Member states in the EU are entangled with one another across diverse policy areas and across scales.  Never has this been more apparent than with the 2010 Debt Crisis in Europe as discussed in the post Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga.  This image shows the nested and connected nature of various scales in the EU, and how certain cities and localities are directly connected to the European scale.

Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga

Part Two

Political Economy in Europe: Austerity and Political Repercussions

Geography, as a discipline, is well-suited to a review of the events of the European Debt Crisis, the resulting policies of austerity, and the social and political implications of those economic events.  As described in Part One, the world economy is deeply uneven, unequal and inequitable.  And yet, that unevenness still manages to affect many people and markets in far-reaching ways.  The bursting of the American housing market bubble instituted global recession, which exposed the overextended deficits of many European Union member states sending the region into its Debt Crisis.  Part Two of this saga will explore the role of the State, or national government, as well as the supra-State of the European Union in managing the crisis and what such a moment holds for the future of these institutions and for the peoples of Europe.

Political Economy

A political economy perspective of economic geography is worthwhile because of its focus on the social relations and power that underpin economic activities and outcomes.  In cultural and critical theories, this perspective is often broadly described as an analysis of the social and political context of phenomenon.  The social context refers to the many relationships between various groups of people in society that form the foundation for its interactions, like employers and workers in production activities.  The political context, in turn, refers to the power, or different abilities, capabilities, and capacities of certain people or groups to act in ways that will impact others.  This can be seen in the power of an employer to hire or fire employees; yet, that power is still subject to other decisions, perhaps some made by stockholders or by market conditions.

Political economists firstly see that there is no such thing as a “free” market and that economies are normatively regulated by larger social systems built on informal and formal habits, rules or customs.  The most power-ful actor in regulating economic geographies is the state.  The state is often more than just the national government, but it also includes its partnered set of public institutions all devoted to social and economic stability.  Thus, it is the state that has been charged with a litany of economic roles to influence a wide breadth of scales and peoples.  These many roles are divided into two main, related functions:  one focused on sustaining economic development or growth; and one focused on maintaining social order.  These functions are related in the global, capitalist system:  on one hand, the system requires economic growth and investment to fund state enterprises that redistribute the wealth associated with economic growth; and on the other hand, that reinvestment into the peoples’ wellbeing is seen to ensure the stability of social conditions required for economic growth to continue.  This partnership of private and public activity in the capitalist system is mutually dependent, for better or for worse.

The State and Economic Stability

There are two general scales that economic regulation occurs at in the European region, that of the European Union at the supranational scale and of the European state at the national scale.  In trying to recover economic stability, the EU supra-state has revisited its eurozone economic policies.  In so doing, the politics of power in the EU are revealed as complicated and compromise-oriented as the European Commission works on one set of new rules while a committee of member states works on another.  Further, the uneven power within the EU is also shown as leading economies like France and Germany call for the imposition of heavy sanctions to those members that exceed the deficit cap, now and in the future.  Although, in 2003 both countries had exceeded the deficit cap and, at the time, swayed the other member states to block sanctions that should have been applied.  Ultimately, the EU approved tougher rules, including sanctions, for the eurozone.  This ruling has also been made into a political opportunity to change the EU’s main governing treaty, the Lisbon Treaty.  The main proposed amendment to the treaty would primarily involve the creation of a permanent crisis fund.  At the national scale, the member states seem wary of this treaty change, as passing the Lisbon Treaty was a cumbersome effort at agreement across national boundaries.

Interestingly, there has been a near consensus in how member states have responded to their shrinking revenues and the resulting Debt Crisis.  Enter the “Age of Austerity”, where many European governments have started to reverse decades of “cradle-to-grave” social welfare policies that have made Western Europe a “lifestyle superpower.” This strikes at the heart of European lifestyles, social customs and political ideologies.  Such policies aimed at wellbeing have long been financed by debt in prosperous times and are now seen as a significant social burden in times of austerity.  And now that it is time for payback, the policies of the Social Democrats of the European political left have been silenced and their legitimacy bankrupt.  Cuts in services are especially difficult to accept as unemployment rates soar alongside national debts and personal incomes fall in step with national revenues.  The loss of the European socialist safety net is occurring when that safety net is most needed.

Austerity and Social Instability

This combination of social burden with debt burden has led to some significant compromises to the stability prized by national governments.  The first tremors were seen in Greece, where violent protests engulfed Athens and general strike echoed throughout the country.  Such demonstrations became a common reaction in the face of austerity cuts.  Workers across Europe organized for a “European Day of Action,” against austerity cuts in the European capitals of Spain, Greece, Belgium, Poland, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, and Lithuania.  Later, the French came out again to dispute the raising of the retirement age and pension reforms.  France was paralyzed as students took to the streets and union workers went on strike for weeks creating fuel shortages, train and air delays.  Such prolonged protests threaten the political stability in Europe and the painful adjustments that come out of this economic crisis will certainly “test” established systems.  Already, debates in national governments are deadlocked as conservative and socialist legislators can’t find common ground for future budgets and the extent of austerity cuts.  States are effectively torn between their obligations and allegiances to markets or citizens.  At the peoples’ scale, these cutbacks are seen to result from the recklessness of the financial elite which now impact livelihoods and lifestyles of the many.  A series of interviews conducted by the New York Times in a piece titled, “The Austerity Zone: Life in the New Europe” revealed the anxious ambivalence of the western Europeans who look to both their national politicians to make necessary cuts and to the EU to fix the situation that led to such a crisis.

HarassMap

Among the 79 million people in Egypt, 55 million have cell phones, and nearly half of these are women.  A group of researchers is using cell-phone technology and geography to address an all-too-common problem in Egypt, where most women report sexual harassment. In fact, nearly half of all Egyptian women experience some form of sexual harassment every day, a pattern that the HarassMap project intends to reverse.

The map uses SMS texting technology to gather reports of various kinds of unwanted encounters, from ogling and catcalling to comments or touching. Each woman also reports the location of the incident, which is corroborated with cell-phone tower triangulation. Trends in such incident reports are tabulated over time, and they are mapped on the project web site. The project has been developed by academics based in both Egypt and the United States, and is supported by several Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

The map has been developed by NiJeL, which uses “high performance mapping” to address social problems worldwide. The map can be adjusted in various ways by users wishing to focus on a particular neighborhood or a particular kind of incident. The default map is at an intermediate scale that shows greater Cairo on a  single image, so that all of the incidents in the central business district, for example, are likely to be agglomerated in a single number. Zooming in to a larger scale map, however, it become possible to identify particular streets or neighborhoods that warrant concern. Zooming out to a smaller scale map, users can find that women in cities and towns outside the capital are also experiencing harassment.

This project is but one example of the spatial dimensions of sexuality; some geographers who study this area of human geography have been organized into the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)  since 1996. The project is perhaps even more closely aligned with the work of the Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) Specialty Group, as it draws attention to the spatial dimensions of gender and the liberties that men presume appropriate to take with women in particular contexts.

Finally, the project relates to the increasingly prevalent work on the geography of crime, which is a growing area of cooperation between academic geographers and criminal justice programs. The detailed mapping of crimes can be used in law enforcement, crime prevention, and public education efforts. In the case of the HarassMap, both crimes (such as indecent exposure) and related transgressive behaviors  are mapped, both to let individual women know where to be most vigilant and to direct law-enforcement efforts. Moreover, these maps can be used to justify the dedication of an increased level of police effort to the problem of sexual harassment, by showing how common it actually is.

Classroom activities:

1. Using Google Chrome or another browser that facilitates language translation on web pages, students who do not read Arabic can examine the web site in greater detail than is otherwise possible. How much does automated translation increase the ability to understand web sites written in languages other than one’s own? What are the limitations of online translators?

2. Distribute base maps of the campus and of the surrounding area, perhaps at several scales, up to an entire metropolitan area. Ask students, working individually, to prepare their own maps of “hot spots” for sexual harassment. Then ask students to compare maps, identifying patterns within maps and patterns of agreement or disagreement among the maps prepared by the students. What factors might account for differences in the level of harassment that women experience in different places? What factors might account for differences in perceptions of the prevalence of harassment?

Concept Caching: Social Contrasts in Mumbai, India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The first successes for the microfinance industry came from India with the Grameen Bank.  However, as discussed in the post Geography Directions: NGOs and Microfinance, the industry has come a long way since those days, in particular through its integration into the neo-liberal framework of development that entangles NGOs, governments, donor agencies and on the ground expectations.  This image provides the visual companion for the areas most commonly served by microfinance NGOs in India: cities.  Indian cities, like Mumbai, are some of the most unequal places in the world.  At its heart, microfinance is intended to service the financially excluded and to help alleviate poverty.  However, as the post describes, the clustered geography of these microfinance NGOs into cities has likely contributed to several trends that may no longer best serve these intentions.

Geography Directions: NGOs and microfinance

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

On 29 July 2010 The New York Times reported that one of the world’s largest microfinance organizations, India’s SKS Microfinance, was preparing to launch on the Indian stock market. Whilst not the first, SKS was one of the biggest, and it caused controversy because a US-based non-profit microfinance group invested in SKS, Unitus, had said it would close down its microfinance activities after the launch. Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the microfinance pioneer he co-founded (Grameen Bank), criticized the move as encouraging profit maximisation. The launch ultimately raised around $350m. Besides launching on the stock market, Indian microfinance institutions are also pursuing securitization, with micro-loans being pooled into marketable securities.

A 2010 article by Bipasha Baruah looks at the role of NGOs in microfinance. Baruah acknowledges the success of NGO microfinance in extending credit to financially excluded groups, particularly women, but points to problems of sustainability, with many smaller microfinance NGOs dependent on donor funding and government subsidies, partly because many provide social services such as rights awareness and literacy classes alongside microcredit. Particularly for these less financially focussed NGOs, attempts to provide links for the poor into the formal banking system can serve poverty reduction well, since this offers a much broader range of financial instruments, including savings accounts, which NGOs cannot legally provide. Baruah highlights doubts in the literature about the long-term impact of microcredit on income levels of the poor, whilst noting benefits in consumption smoothing and women’s control over household resources. Studies also show concentration of NGOs in urban and better-developed areas, with less activity in very rural and very poor areas, following a certain market logic which in some cases leads to competition between microfinance NGOs in relatively well-served areas, at the expense of covering areas with greater financial exclusion. Contradictions between financial sustainability and reaching the poorest may also appear, with NGOs in some cases “moving up the poverty scale” to focus on those more able to borrow and repay.

Beyond this, Baruah argues that “the use of microfinance carries implicit neo-liberal assumptions about how development should occur.” She highlights literature showing that borrowers often lack economies of scale, complementary inputs, key skills, or other requirements for succeeding in an often highly competitive marketplace with limited microcredit funds. Uncoordinated access to microcredit can often lead to an overexpansion of particular local industries, limiting the poverty alleviation benefits and making microcredit, in one commentator’s words, “a glorified form of subsistence.” Some NGOs have recognised these problems and attempted to support borrowers with various aspects of enterprise development, including information and training. Some NGOs also organise women to pool their labour or act as unions to demand increased wages and better working conditions, and Baruah suggests pressing for government employment programs to support the poorest, who are often unwilling to seek credit because they lack the other resources needed to use such credit effectively. Baruah concludes that overall microfinance “is firmly embedded within a neo-liberal framework that seeks to increase access to existing financial resources without really challenging the entrenched status quo of unequal power relations between different groups of people,” and that this is precisely why microfinance has enjoyed such great support from governments, NGOs and donor agencies.

By Robin de la Motte

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Container Ship, Rotterdam

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

One of the most significant trends that have contributed to globalization has been the tremendous advancements in transportation and communications technologies.  Although globalization processes have always been at work as long as people have moved and interacted with one another, the scale and pace of 21st century globalization has brought remarkable change and convergence.  Economic geographers do caution, however, of the growing unevenness or ‘regionalization’ that is associated with globalization.  This image and its caption speak to such clusters and changes, as the port city of Rotterdam (itself a case study in the changing geographies of globalization) will overtake another locality in the ranking of world’s busiest ports.  It also highlights the constant maintenance required for global competition and success; often cited as globalization winners and losers.

Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga

Part One

Economic Geography and the Global Recession:  The uneven geographies of economic and financial globalization

The 2008 global recession both revealed and complicated many existing notions of the interconnections and interdependencies that make up the web of the world economy.  Focusing on the European world region provides a very interesting, and at times mind-boggling, example of this web and how it links people, institutions, and futures across all geographical scales.  The global recession began in the United States, but it has undermined the established, overarching economic theories of Western, capitalist institutions as well as institutionalized lifestyles of European peoples.  Part One will focus on the unevenness of the world economy and how a select few, speculating on local markets caused a global recession.

Economic Geography and Uneven Globalization

In order to understand these complexities, one must turn to some kind of theory of the world economy.  Economic geography provides an excellent approach for its focus on the spatial patterns of economic activity and the economic processes that shape and change those patterns.  Economic geographers see that the contemporary, globalized economy has emerged along with technological advancements in communication and transportation, which have engendered a truly global financial system and have necessitated the creation of global governance structures to “coordinate” trade and development.  Yet, economic globalization is a very spatially uneven phenomenon.  That if anything, some economic geographers have argued that it is ‘regionalized’, as the actual geographies of trading, production and consumption, finance, and development convey.  This unevenness is most significant in the concentration of power that qualifies globalized networks, especially in finance.  It is the decisions of a few, concentrated in specific locales that can influence sweeping global trends.  The consequences of this unevenness are best seen in the 2008 global recession.

The Local Making of a Global Recession

True to the unevenness and complexities of the global financial system, the story of Europe’s Debt Crisis does not actually begin in Europe.  Instead, the 2008 global recession was set up as a house of cards built on rampant spending and loose lending in the US housing market.  The big players of the global financial system were wooed by seemingly lucrative investments in the mortgages and rising home prices of select local contexts in specific US-states, notably California.  Both European and American investment banks fueled the frenzy by crafting complicated bundles of these mortgages into their investment portfolios.  As long as home values and borrowers were buoyant, these portfolios were literally money in the bank.  However, this buoyancy was illusory; much of these mortgages were predatory and the loans were undersigned with doubtful prospect for repayment.  Further, the overconfidence in the market led to an oversupply of homes which eventually slowed the housing market, instituting a downward spiral of home prices, foreclosures and more empty homes.  This hit directly at the inflated portfolios of US and European investment banks, which were loaded up with convoluted packages of these insolvent mortgages.  When home values tanked and loans defaulted, these portfolios were rife with toxic assets and significantly devalued.  In these banks, assets and capital vanished, leading to the first ripple of a financial crisis.  Ultimately, this crumbling of the major global investment banks (nearly all concentrated in the US and Europe), triggered the dwindling of available capital for lending and borrowing at all scales, now commonly recognized as a “credit crunch.”  Further investing was limited by the credit crunch, but also by a reversal in lending ideology that saw many ventures as increasingly risky even to those banks not initially affected.  This had far reaching impacts in places like India, Asia, Latin America and beyond.

From Private to Public:  the European Debt Crisis

Ultimately, the insolvency of private lending institutions made its way onto public balance sheets, as US and European governments sought to stabilize their markets through bank bailouts and the purchase of toxic assets.  Following the bailouts and the decline in global lending, global economic activity overall slowed or crashed into a global recession, and local tax bases in the US and Europe subsequently dwindled.  In Europe, national governments found themselves with significant budget shortfalls which overextended their current debt obligations.  In Europe, united by the political and economic structures of the European Union (EU), this would reveal another pattern and scale of unevenness.  The “convergence criteria” for the eurozone, the EU’s economic space, dictated the approved debt levels of member states.  In prosperous times, these debt levels were not rigidly enforced and were veiled by dubious accounting and statistics of some member states.  However, with the reality of global economic downturn, these national governments were no longer able to hide their massive national deficits that grossly surpassed EU limits.  The first, and most desperate, of these debt-laden member states was Greece.  Greece’s national debt was seen to overshadow the value of its entire economy.  The deficits in Spain, Portugal and Ireland were next to come under scrutiny.  Fears were then directed at the euro, its threatened credibility and devaluing, and the European Debt Crisis was in full swing.  The New York Times created a series of maps to illustrate the changing geographies of European Debt.  The situation in Europe has also influenced other centers of the world economy: some argued the Europe’s crisis could aid the U.S. recovery, others hinder it; for China, the situation complicated changing currency policy and boosted its share in international aid agencies, like the International Monetary Fund.  The European Debt Crisis shows the same uneven, concentrated economic and financial system at work.  Even more so, it illustrates hierarchical diffusion as troubles erupt at economic epicenters, ripple outward, and trigger new economic aftershocks and financial tremors.

Upcoming:  Part Two will dive into the local and national effects of the European Debt Crisis by investigating the turn to austerity, the reactions of  European citizenry and the social and political implications.

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