GLOBALIZATION AND NEW TRENDS IN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
ZHU Hong1, FENG Dan1, WANG Bin1,2
1. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
2. School of Geography, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350007, China
Abstract The traditional cultural geography mainly investigates the cultures of a big region and the researches focus on five central issues: cultural landscapes, cultural ecology, cultural integration and cultural regionalization. However, within the contexts of globalization and profound urban transformation, the development of urban cultures are influenced not only by physical factors but more importantly, by socio-cultural elements such as the urban development strategy and governance mode, the economic location, the transportation, the big events, the industrial pattern, urban space reconstruction, the urban population and the concept of consumption, all of which have brought revolutionary changes to the background of urban culture. Under this circumstance, new features appear in the geographical study of urban culture. Also, the process of globalization has brought extraordinary changes to urban culture: new architecture and popular public space mixed with exotic elements are welling up, globalized lifestyles widely spread and traditional values are challenged. Therefore, it is urgent to study the forthcoming questions such as how to deal with the dilemma of foreign cultures and local traditions for the sake of the development of cities.
In the western world, globalization has been a very popular narrative in academic study and cultural geography has been at the forefront of disciplines relating the experiences and consequences for thinking society and the global circumstance at both the empirical and theoretical levels. Most of the research and articles would be called post-modernization, basing argues on successive critiques with telling rich stories of Exclusion and Inclusion of difference-sexualities, genders, racings, ethnicities and ages. However, in China, the culture globalization has not been a focus in culture geography yet though the function of culture capital in the urban competition has been realized. Regarding to the fact that most of the urban studies are organized from the social transformation perspective rather than from the point of globalization nowadays, to argue the impacts of globalization on urban cultures systematically is helpful to both the geographical theory and practice. More importantly, it may provide great opportunities to perfect the methodology and theory in the field of culture geography through the overview of the literature in the west and the analysis of practice happened in China. Based on the analysis and arrangement to the overall documentaries related to urban culture research at home and abroad, this paper attempts to give a systematic summary to the new trends in the cultural geographical research, aiming to be of great help for the cultural geographical research at home.
2008, Vol. 23 
