Perspectives on ‘Demography at the Edge’
Prescott C. Ensign 安森
Andrew Taylor2011, Demography at the Edge: Remote Human Populations in Developed Nations
Regional development theories suggest concentration of a developed country's human and economic resources around mainly urban population nodes. These nodes have critical mass both of producers and consumers. They are well connected to markets and information through hard and soft infrastructure. They also tend to become centres for the creative industries, sports and recreation, education and learning because they have both the population and the economic wealth to invest in these activities. The more distant one gets from these centres (although the relationship is not strictly linear), the more difficult it has proven to bring together and sustain development resources. Consequently, just as different demographic patterns are observed between nations, there are important sub-national differences. -- While there may be continuing disagreements about how remoteness is defined, even cursory examination of maps of Australia, North America and northern Europe reveal where the "extreme cases‟ of remoteness are most likely situated. Each map has areas where there are many labels for towns and cities and where there exists a spider-web like network of roads and railway lines. As the eye moves (generally north) from these areas, the number of labels diminishes, along with the number of alternative transport routes between towns and cities. Ultimately, in the far north (and more so towards the west in Australia and North America), the level of human infrastructure is very low and population centres are small and widely dispersed. In Canada, the transition from high density human and transport networks occurs within a few hundred kilometres north of the border with the United States. The Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut are jurisdictions most obviously "remote‟ from the main population centres, but so are large northern sections of the more southerly provinces. In Australia, the Northern Territory embodies remoteness, along with the northern and eastern parts of Western Australia and the north and west of Queensland. Alaska in the United States has a population density of 0.42 persons per square kilometre, by far the lowest density of all States and comparing to 31 persons per square kilometre for the country as a whole. The northern European situation is more politically complex. The Nordic Council of Ministers has identified the "Northern Sparsely Populated Areas‟ which includes parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, along with the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Iceland. -- Australia, Canada, the United States and Europe's Northern Sparsely Populated Areas face substantial challenges in including their furthest jurisdictions in the processes of post- industrialisation and the development of knowledge economies. It is now widely accepted that such processes are human ones – innovation diffusion relies on the interactions between people and the organisations they construct. People provide the core inputs for networks and clusters. People are the entrepreneurs in economic systems. The collections of people as producers, intermediaries and markets constitute the critical mass which drives innovation. People are not just qualitative competitive variables; they also feature as inputs to quantitative variables such as economic structure and productivity. The role of people is not limited to economics and neither should economics be seen as the sole justification for the existence of remote populations. People sustain social, political and cultural capital - forces for social development, creativity and cultural enrichment which do not necessarily have to have immediate economic returns.
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