Flows

Spaces, places, and landscapes change over time. Elements of them move, and where there is movement, there is what we call a "flow." This can be anything from your daily journey to school to the flow of electrons at the speed of light that is providing you with this explanation.

So let's go with the flow, so to speak!

Flows in Geography

Geographers measure and map spatial flows. These may be daily traffic flows in your local city or cultural flows that have happened over centuries.

Types of Flows in Geography

Everything flows when scales of space and time are taken into account. Over eons, mountains erode into plains while species arise, flourish, and disappear.

The human world is based on flows humans make and compel, as well as the flows of the natural world that humans depend on (the air we breathe, the water we drink, and so forth).

Flows of People

With the above in mind, we can consider the first and most fundamental type of flow in human geography: humans! People move because we must: it is a biological imperative. Not just because we need exercise, though this is part of it. We have to find food, sources of energy, and other resources. If we don't move, someone else moves to provide them to us.

Fig. 1 - Flow map of global commercial flights in 2014 shows volume, destination, and origin of flows of people

We also have to move, or someone else does, so that we keep our gene pool diverse. In other words, the human species cannot survive if we breed with our nearest kin (and most societies have taboos against this), so the search for mates, in humans as in many other species, is an example of a biological imperative that has spurred flows.

Material Flows

Another type of flow is of materials. Material flows involve anything physical that is moved, such as a natural resource. Humans survive because of material flows of energy, food, and other essentials, as well as non-essential goods we use to gain status, for entertainment, etc.

Non-Material Flows

A non-material flow is conveyed via some sort of tangible medium. An idea is conveyed, for example, via language, speech, and air, and is received and processed via sense organs and the brain. Capital is exchanged electronically, using electrons, hardware, and software to flow. Flows of culture and flows of capital are prime examples of non-material flows.

Flows in Geography - Example

The journey-to-work is a specific type of flow that has long attracted the interest of spatial analysts. It involves flows of urban commuters. Here's an example of how such a study would work and how it would be useful.

A city, we'll call it Mundana, has a booming economy. People are moving to Mundana in droves, and developers are building new housing and shopping areas to stay apace. Roads are the responsibility of the city government, and it is struggling to keep up. it needs to expand existing roads (more lanes) and build new roads. A journey-to-work study can help identify factors that can contribute to a "smarter" road network for commuters.

The study looks at traffic volume on the existing road network and how it fluctuates over the work day. It focuses on areas of maximal congestion (where there are regular slowdowns and gridlock), which are often bottlenecks such as heavy merge zones, bridges and tunnels, and highways without enough lanes. Using GIS, the study looks at the growth in traffic volume over time to be able to project congested areas in the future.

If you've been in large US metro areas, you've seen the results of these traffic flow studies. Not only have highways been expanded and others built, but HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lanes have been designated to stimulate carpooling, alternate routes and connectors have been constructed, tolls have been enacted, the timing of stoplights has been altered, and many other improvements have been made.

Fig. 2 - Traffic flow in Washington state has been improved by a lane reserved for HOVs and buses, as well as displays helping drivers judge driving time

Global Flows in Geography

Globalization is a process of altering the size, direction, and velocity of flows around the planet. It is usually associated with ever-increasing speed and volume. Let's look at this in more detail.

Global Flows of People

Humans are a wandering species; we've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, first by land, then by sea. In around 1522, we circled the globe for the first time, and we haven't looked back. We carried ideas and goods with us to more and more places, more and more quickly. We added air travel in the 20th century.

Tourism, travel for other reasons (such as for business), and migration are different types of global flows of people that depend on other flows. Like all flows, flows of people are heavily restricted by cost and also by legal constraints. Many countries restrict outward migration while most restrict incoming migration.

In general, in the 21st century, the greatest net out-flows of people are from areas that are impoverished and/or in conflict, with other factors such as climate change contributing as well. The greatest net in-flows of people are to countries with robust economies and many available jobs, combined with permissive or poorly enforced immigration policies.

Global Flows of Capital

Once upon a time, people needed to carry money with them, like the galleons that brought silver from Mexico to Spain. Now, money changes hands instantaneously via electronic means.

Free-market, free-trade proponents advocate a world with few capital controls wherein financial resources can flow quickly to and from where they are needed. In reality, however, global capital flows are constrained by the laws of individual countries as well as by various aspects of information technology infrastructure. Money can't flow to a place where it cannot be received electronically unless it is carried by people, and it can never flow (legally) into a country where it is blocked. Some countries, such as tax havens, are easy to send money into and out of (generally to banks and individuals).

Global Flows of Culture

People backed by capital have, since the voyages of Columbus or before, been able to cross oceans and continents, diffusing culture at the same time they were trading in goods and services.

Today, ideas, tastes, styles, recipes, belief systems, and other aspects of culture flow globally via the Internet, reaching more and more people than ever before as online access increases and translator bots improve. However, countries such as China, with its so-called Great Firewall, filter out much of the Internet traffic entering and leaving their territory in an attempt to control cultural diffusion. While China does this for ideological reasons based on politics, other countries do so to protect national values associated with cultural complexes such as religion, given that the unregulated Internet is a free-for-all of ideas that challenge every existing belief system in some way or another.

It can probably be said that globalization, thanks to the Internet, in overwhelming the world with information, has provoked a backlash from cultural and political systems that feel threatened, in many cases justifiably.

Global Flows of Resources (Trade in Goods and Services)

People, culture, capital: all these need the raw materials that the Earth provides to exist in the first place. The Earth's "hardware" is its natural resources in the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. Humans are made of these and transform and combine them to provide energy for heat and light, calories for sustenance, building materials for shelter, fiber for clothing, luxury items for adornment, and so forth.

Humans first circled the globe in search of spices such as black pepper and other lightweight, luxury items that were worth capital investment by 16th-century Europeans. Trade flows increase or decrease depending on supply and demand, and there are numerous issues with both of these. Demand can increase or decrease for cultural reasons (e.g., a certain item becomes sought after because it confers status, or is abandoned because it becomes the symbol of something bad), economic reasons (e.g., consumers increase or decrease in affluence), or political reasons (e.g., changing trade regulations). Supply can also increase or decrease for many reasons.

Fig. 3 - The fruit of Piper nigrum, the black pepper plant, was highly sought after by European elites in the late 1400s. It was the principal spice that compelled investors to support Columbus on his westward voyages

Nowadays, material flows are more important than ever before, even with the existence of the Internet. This is simply because more people are more affluent than ever before, so they consume more. In addition, non-material services also flow around the world, sometimes offered by people in person, but more often offered via electronic means.

Shifting Flows in Geography

We said at the beginning that space never stands still, so we have to take flows into account if we want to explain changes in places. But flows often aren't predictable, either! Using GIS, geographers can map and predict flows ever more accurately, and by gaining a better understanding of the factors that cause flows, they can even predict when flows will shift, to where, and by how much.