Abstract
HISTORY/THEORY/ADMINISTRATION
10. Planning History
10-1 GENERAL HISTORY
33-3320
Colonialism. Ethnography. Governance. Humanitarianism.
This article suggests that the spaces of British settler colonialism and metropolitan science were interconnected, underexamined, grounds upon which both ethnography and colonial governance developed. Focusing on the governmental and ethnographic activities of Sir George Grey during the mid-19th century it argues that the origins of ethnography and the specifically humanitarian governance of spaces invaded by settlers were co-constituted. Although anthropologists have long recognised the complicity of ethnography in modern colonialism, the relationship runs far deeper and extends far more broadly, than has been appreciated in even the most incisive critiques. That relationship was also located in violent settler colonial spaces that have been relatively neglected in the anthropological historiography. The article concludes that Grey’s governmental practices, and his representations of them, established the terms upon which cultural genocide, with its logic of elimination, could be posited as a humane alternative to racial extermination. It shows that Grey’s promotion of amalgamation, articulated as a preferably cultural and social extinction over a physical one, went on to influence the highest levels of colonial administration. On behalf of the British Empire as a whole, Grey thus helped to reconcile settler colonialism with humanitarian governance.
10-3 HISTORY OF CITIES AND REGIONS
33-3321
Neoliberalism. Sports. Urban policy.
With this paper we examine the 2004 Olympic Games as an ambivalent catalyst for the implementation of neoliberal urban policies in Athens. We draw upon two distinct analytical streams: first, regulationist scholars’ conception of neoliberalization as a path-dependent and, to a large extent, state-led process, and, second, Skocpol’s ‘autonomy state’ approach. We argue that the implementation of neoliberal urban policies in Athens has been shaped by a combination of centralism, low central state capacity, organizational and financial weakness of business elites, and citizen movements’ opposition. We first provide an overview of Athenian urban policies since the 1960s; then we examine the preparation of the 2004 Olympic Games; and, finally, we investigate the post-Olympic use of Olympic venues, including the period of the current sovereign debt crisis. In the conclusion we emphasize that the bailout agreement between Greece and the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Union aims at reboosting neoliberal public policies in a radical way.
33-3322
Geopolitics. Nature. Sovereignty.
Through the case study of the contested British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, this paper contributes to discussions on ‘territorial volumes’ by exploring the role of the ‘elemental’ in the protracted sovereignty dispute between Spain and Gibraltar. Drawing on scholarship by Elden, Adey, McCormack and others in political and cultural geography, the paper highlights the value of foregrounding the elements of rock, water, air and fire (in the form of the sun) in attempts to understand the tensions between Gibraltar and Spain whilst also demonstrating the significant intersections between the elemental and the human body. Whilst avoiding the snares of environmental determinism, the paper makes the case for an elemental ontology that functions through and with the proclivities and molecular specificities of the elements in order to better understand the construct of the territorial volume, the relationship between elemental and bodily volumes, and the site specific geopolitical realities, fractures and possibilities that are laid bare as the elements are unearthed.
11. Concepts of Planning
11-1 APPROACHES (COMPREHENSIVE/STRATEGIC/COLLABORATIVE)
33-3323
Development. Innovation. Knowledge base. Scales. Urban development.
Knowledge-based urban developments (KBUDs) are an increasingly common element of urban planning and strategy making: policy makers and developers set out to stimulate economic prosperity by promoting the integration and concentration of research, technology, and human capital. But KBUD is, by its advocates’ own admission, a fuzzy concept, assuming that local physical development will drive urban upgrading within wider innovative production networks. We seek to address one element of this confusion by exploring how physical developments actively create innovative connections between local actors, drawing on the microscale science park and incubator literature. Using the case of one knowledge precinct, Kennispark in the east of the Netherlands, we investigate how active and passive elements of KBUDs drive integration of knowledge infrastructure in the urban fabric, as a prerequisite to building cross-city connections. On the basis of both qualitative and quantitative data, we conclude that there is a dynamic interrelation of proximity and connectivity within the precinct that contributes to building within-city knowledge communities that may in turn lead to improved cross-city connectivity and hence urban upgrading.
33-3324
Critical analysis. Data. Geographic information systems. Geography.
This essay offers paths for scholars influenced by the critical social sciences and theoretical humanities to contribute to the construction of concepts and digital practices of ‘‘data’’ that will allow ‘‘data’’ to better align with their approaches to scholarly inquiry. In particular, it explores how ‘‘geographic information’’ might be refashioned, rereading it from simplified theoretical positions drawn from interpretative inquiry, process-relational thought, and new materialisms. Geographic information has largely called forth self-sufficient entities that have intensive properties, are indexed by location in an absolute space, and are known objectively through a geographic gaze. By contrast, this article suggests ways geographic information may be reimagined to constitute spaces as relational, matter as vibrant, and/or knowledge as situated. If all claims are seen as interpretative, the boundaries between what were previously considered the roles for reader, researcher, data structures, observer, and observed may also need to be reordered, with implications for the ways that we ‘‘interface’’ with data. Although such paths can be difficult to travel, they hold promise for extending the reach of interpretative and (nonpositivist) empirical practice as well as favorably altering the terms on which interpretative scholars can participate in debates around, and practices of, ‘‘data’’ today.
33-3325
Area studies. Japan. Nation-states.
Geographers and others have recently addressed the problematic of area studies by suggesting alternate ways to recognize the connectedness of peoples and places. However, some areas seem so self-evident as to resist their undoing. One such area is the nation state. In this paper, I examine the resilience of the nation state as area through the example of Japanese tudies. I discuss the emergence in the United States of Japanese studies as a field, and thus Japan as an area worthy of study, due to its enemy status in World War II, which highlights a troubling disciplinary origin in interrogation that still haunts the academy. I continue by explaining how Japan’s postwar amnesia of its pre-1945 empire and the influence of one research monograph in particular helped produce the enduring notion of a homogeneous and spatially isolated Japan. Subsequent decades of research have tried to undermine this notion, albeit without questioning the ontology of Japan itself. In this paper, I outline challenges to unthinking the nation state as area, including existing institutional barriers and the role of Japanese studies as a source of professional identity, both in general and for me personally.
33-3326
Ethnicity. Neighborhoods. Residential districts. Scales. Segregation.
There continues to be cross-disciplinary interest in the patterns, extent, and changing contexts of segregation and spatial inequality more generally. The changes are clearly context dependent but at the same time there are broad generalizations that arise from the processes of residential sorting and selection. A major question in U.S. segregation research is how the growth of Asian and Hispanic populations is influencing patterns of segregation and diversity at the neighborhood level. In this article we use a variant of a nearest neighbor approach to map, graph, and evaluate patterns of race and ethnicity at varying scales. We show that using a multiscalar approach to segregation can provide a detailed and more complete picture of segregation. The research confirms work from other studies that segregation is decreasing between some groups and increasing between others, and the patterns, and processes can be described as dynamic diversity. In a series of maps of ethnic clusters and population homogeneity we show how metropolitan areas, represented in this case by Los Angeles, now display patterns of complex living arrangements with multiple groups inhabiting both local neighborhoods and wider community spheres.
33-3327
Agriculture. Clusters. Natural resources.
Increasing attention has begun to focus on the important role that organisations undertaking intermediary functions can play in supporting emerging clusters of small producers. In contrast to most studies of intermediaries that focus on governance and filling information gaps, in this paper we examine how the organisational skills of intermediaries evolve as firms in the cluster assume a broader range of practices. Through a purpose-built typology and a detailed case study, the argument is made not only that intermediaries act to facilitate the diffusion of knowledge but also that their scope of activities, extending into coordinating joint actions and new investment initiatives, places them at the centre of the network of organisations. This growing influence of intermediaries has implications for producer firms, especially in aspects such as inclusion of smaller producers and network formation.
33-3328
Conflict resolution. Decision making. Deliberative planning. Ecosystem. Environmental knowledge. Innovation. Knowledge. Knowledge systems.
The ecosystem approach is used to analyse four case studies from England to determine what kind of ecosystem knowledge was used by people, and how it shaped their arguments. The results are reported across decision-making venues concerned with: innovation, conflict management, maintenance of ecosystem function, and recognizing the environment as an asset. In each area we identify the sources and uses of conceptual, instrumental, political, and social knowledge. We found that the use of these knowledges can benefit the process as well as the quality of outcomes, and so ‘add value’ to the decision-making process. However, the case studies did not exhibit any simple linear–rational model of knowledge use. Ecosystems thinking took many forms and depended on different institutional settings. As an argument-making device, the ecosystem approach must be seen in the context of a wider set of social and political processes, which involves a range of complex strategies and motives that explain the apparent ‘messiness’ of environmental decision making. The paper demonstrates that as a conceptual framework, the ecosystem approach provides a valuable theoretical template to help us discover how and what knowledge is used in deliberative styles of decision making.
33-3329
Cost-benefit analysis. Ecosystem. Knowledge.
Managing ecosystems for multiple benefits and stakeholders is a formidable challenge requiring diverse knowledge to be discovered, transmitted, and aggregated. Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) is advocated as a theoretically grounded decision-support tool, but in practice it frequently appears to exert little influence. To understand this puzzle, I consider ecosystem knowledge and CBA from both the demand and supply sides. I argue that all ecosystem knowledge is contestable, which restricts the influence of technocratic tools like CBA. On the demand side, democratic mechanisms shape decision makers’ motivations and incentives, but also provide a substitute for technocratic evidence. Supply-side factors limiting the influence of CBA include the scarcity of decision-pertinent evidence and the uncertain meaning and usefulness of CBA. Demand-side factors are resistant to change; but taking account of them, I suggest some supply-side reforms, arguing that CBA is best regarded not as a tool but as a venue where ecosystem knowledge is aggregated and contested.
33-3330
Economic development. Governance. Housing. Public services.
This paper questions the continued dominance of the network governance approach in public policy and administration and proposes an alternative framework. We find little evidence to support claims for a paradigmatic shift towards network governance in the English case. Neither does the evidence support claims for a weakening of vertical linkages or a strengthening of horizontal linkages within, or across, service delivery chains in England. Instead, bureaucratic and hierarchical structures remain pervasive and power remains highly centralised. The two case studies, of economic development and affordable housing provision, demonstrate how reforms are driven by elected politicians’ political objectives and their support of various target groups in society. Nevertheless, policy making is constrained by conditions of ‘postdemocracy’—essentially, the exigencies of contemporary electoral politics and the pervasive influence of business. The study of public administration and management needs to refocus on the implications for the public services of postdemocracy and address critical questions of power, competing interests, mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, and contested claims to knowledge and expertise within service delivery chains.
33-3331
Education. Geography. Human behavior. Knowledge. Power.
This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geography’s contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educational settings and its highly disparate expression as a research discipline in university departments. The project also hopes to contribute to the development of a framework for communicating the aims and purposes of geography in schools internationally, because here, too, there is great variety in definitions of national standards and even of disciplinary allegiances (including, e.g., the social studies, humanities, and biological sciences). GeoCapabilities does not seek to flatten such divergences, for one of geography’s great strengths is its breadth. The long-term goal is to establish a secure platform for the international development of teachers’ capacities as creative and disciplined innovators. The project encourages teachers to think beyond program delivery and implementation and to embrace their role as the curriculum makers.
33-3332
Governance. Institutional analysis. Public participation. Science and technology.
In this paper we develop new insights on science governance at a time when an emphasis on public engagement in responding to questions of trust in science is giving way to a more systemic and networked perspective. In a meta-analysis across seventeen UK public dialogue processes we identify five spheres of public concern about the governance of science and technology relating to: the purposes of science; trust; inclusion; speed and direction of innovation; and equity. Forty in-depth interviews with senior UK science policy actors reveal highly partial institutional responses to these concerns and help explain the underlying processes that close down, and at times open up, reflection and response on public values. Finally, we consider the implications of this analysis for the future of science governance, prospects for more anticipatory, reflexive, and inclusive forms of governing, and the roles for critical social science inquiry.
33-3333
Decision making. Ecosystem. Knowledge. Policy. Science and technology. Spatial planning.
The limited understanding of how ecosystem service knowledge (ESK) is used in decision making constrains our ability to learn from, replicate, and convey success stories. We explore use of ESK in decision making in three international cases: national coastal planning in Belize; regional marine spatial planning on Vancouver Island, Canada; and regional land-use planning on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Decision makers, scientists, and stakeholders collaborated in each case to use a standardized ecosystem service accounting tool to inform spatial planning. We evaluate interview, survey, and observation data to assess evidence of ‘conceptual’, ‘strategic’, and ‘instrumental’ use of ESK. We find evidence of all modes: conceptual use dominates early planning, while strategic and instrumental uses occur iteratively in middle and late stages. Conceptual and strategic uses of ESK build understanding and compromise that facilitate instrumental use. We highlight attributes of ESK, characteristics of the process, and general conditions that appear to affect how knowledge is used. Meaningful participation, scenario development, and integration of local and traditional knowledge emerge as important for particular uses.
33-3334
Classification. Demographics. Surveys. Uncertainty.
In 2010 the American Community Survey (ACS) replaced the long form of the decennial census as the sole national source of demographic and economic data for small geographic areas such as census tracts. These small area estimates suffer from large margins of error, however, which makes the data difficult to use for many purposes. The value of a large and comprehensive survey like the ACS is that it provides a richly detailed, multivariate, composite picture of small areas. This article argues that one solution to the problem of large margins of error in the ACS is to shift from a variable-based mode of inquiry to one that emphasizes a composite multivariate picture of census tracts. Because the margin of error in a single ACS estimate, like household income, is assumed to be a symmetrically distributed random variable, positive and negative errors are equally likely. Because the variable-specific estimates are largely independent from each other, when looking at a large collection of variables these random errors average to zero. This means that although single variables can be methodologically problematic at the census tract scale, a large collection of such variables provides utility as a contextual descriptor of the place(s) under investigation. This idea is demonstrated by developing a geodemographic typology of all U.S. census tracts. The typology is firmly rooted in the social scientific literature and is organized around a framework of concepts, domains, and measures. The typology is validated using public domain data from the City of Chicago and the U.S. Federal Election Commission. The typology, as well as the data and methods used to create it, is open source and published freely online.
33-3335
Europe. Land development. Land use. Land use policies. Planning. Regional planning.
This paper evaluates the extent to which the introduction of four new regional planning and land policy instruments in the Netherlands improves the delivery of regional planning objectives. On the basis of case-study research, we identify why and to what extent the Dutch regional authorities—the provinces—have adopted these new instruments and assess whether or not the instruments offer opportunities for improving the delivery of regional planning objectives. The study shows that regional policies and plans are often implemented without consideration of their consequences for national or local planning objectives. As a result, the instruments may not address current policy delivery needs, and may even compound local policy failures. We conclude that the use of such instruments should be accompanied by a more thorough discussion of regional planning tasks and objectives, and a debate on the role of regional authorities within the multilevel governance setting.
33-3336
Commodity. Culture. Institutional change. Normative planning. Production. Regional development. Regulation. Trade.
With this paper we explore how institutional changes have influenced the regional development of Yiwu City, East China. The regional development in Yiwu City can be regarded as constituting a specific model in transitional China, which revolves around the establishment, growth, and internationalization of the local commodity trading market. The success of the Yiwu model lies in the interaction between globalization, local institutions, and commodity trading markets. However, we argue that the strategic coupling perspective has its limitations in explaining the development trajectory of the Yiwu model. We develop an integrated paradigm of regional development located between new regionalism and global production networks by synthesizing Scott’s institutional framework. We identify a pronounced and long-established cultural–cognitive element in the entrepreneurial spirit of local people, which led to the establishment of a commodity trading market at the beginning of 1980s. However, the sustainable development of the Yiwu model needs to be supplemented by normative and regulative institutional pillars. We further argue that the developmental local state remains critical to the regional development in developing countries in terms of correcting market failure, encouraging entrepreneurship, and creating a competitive business environment to accommodate globalization.
33-3337
Dynamic planning. Health. Location planning. Networks. Spatial analysis.
Recent health threats, such as the SARS, H1N1, and ebola pandemics, have stimulated great interest in network models to study the transmission of communicable diseases through human interaction and mobility. Most current network models have focused on an individual-centric perspective where individuals are represented as nodes and the interactions among them as edges. Few of these models are concerned with the discovery of the spatial patterns and dynamics of epidemics. We propose a location-centric, transmission network approach, in which nodes denote locations and edges denote possible disease transmissions between locations. We then identify the dynamics of transmission flows, the dynamics of critical locations, and the spatial–temporal extent of transmission pathways to assess the impact of these spatial dynamics on the evolution of an epidemic. Results show that transmission flows shift from elementary schools to middle schools and finally universities and professional schools at different phases of an epidemic. Critical locations, identified using network analysis, are responsible for the upsurge in transmission flows during the peaks of the epidemic. The length of transmission pathways shows a power law distribution and their spatial extent is rather small. Insights gained from this study will help devise spatially sensitive strategies to control communicable diseases.
11-2 PLANNING THEORIES
33-3338
Area studies. Development. Geography. Race. Radical planning.
The relationship between Geography and Area Studies remains fraught but crucial, as it highlights at least three imperatives we cannot do without: to decolonize disciplinary Geography, to forge more egalitarian and sustainable relations of knowledge production and to foreground enduring differences of life ‘elsewhere’ represented in novel forms. I argue that these imperatives require an Area Studies ethos, and that the longer Geography as we know it remains aloof from such imperatives, its days as an art or science of broader value are numbered.
33-3339
Government. Religion. Subjectivity.
In this article, I situate Foucault’s governmentality analytics between his first lecture course (On the Will to Know, 1970–1971) and his first course after his two ‘governmentality’ lectures (On the Government of the Living, 1979–1980). The lectures are interconnected by a shared interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as well as by different but related obsessions with the production of truth: the earlier, with truth as fact; the latter, with truth as self-relation. The former analyses discourses of truth, law, inquiry and sovereignty in ancient Greece. The latter focuses on early Christian individual manifestations of truth (baptism, penance and spiritual direction) forming a genealogy of confession and, Foucault suggests, of western subjectivity itself. This article uses the analytical categories of governmentality, usually used to analyse regimes of government, to perform a comparative reading of the lecture courses, charting the continuities and ruptures in their various studies of episteme, techne, identities, ethos and problematisations. This suggests that the earlier lectures outline the birth of the sovereign–juridical compact that modern governmentalities would emerge through and against, whereas the later lectures use the term ‘governmentality’ less, but enable the analysis of the conduct of conduct to progress to the ethical scale of self-formation.
33-3340
China. Infrastructure. State government.
This study empirically tests the theory of state rescaling with a study of recent city-region making in China. The implementation of two interjurisdictional projects, the Pearl River Delta Intercity Railway and the Guangzhou–Foshan Metro, are critically investigated to probe the restructuring states in the transitional Pearl River Delta. We argue that the principle of scale theory is relevant to China, where scalar reconfiguration of states has been identified in the process of city-region making. To implement the projects, governments at various geographical scales engage in numerous activities of flexible competition, cooperation, and negotiation. The paper draws on a detailed empirical observation of the actual process, to broaden the theoretical framework of state rescaling, showing four dimensions of state-rescaling categories of restructuring: upscaling, downscaling, statization, and destatization. The paper also highlights the creation of the city-region—that is, state space—as both a de jure and de facto political instrument to rearticulate state power. With an emphasis on the concomitant trend of centralization or upscaling, it also contributes to the existing literature on state rescaling in China by denaturalizing the trend of decentralization, or downscaling.
33-3341
Ecology. Ecosystem. Environmental assessment. Knowledge. Policy. Science and technology.
Assessments of environmental issues are often expected to tackle the perceived disconnect between scientific knowledge and environmental policy making. However, their actual influence on processes of knowledge communication and use remains understudied. We provide one of the first studies of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA), itself one of the first national-level assessments of ecosystem services. We explore expectations, early experiences, and implications for its role in promoting knowledge use, drawing on both documentary evidence and qualitative analysis of interviews with NEA authors and potential users. Many interviewees expected instrumental use; that is, facts directly assisting problem solving. This matches the rhetoric surrounding the NEA’s creation. However, we found more early evidence of interacting conceptual uses (learning), and strategic uses (sometimes deemed misuse). Such uses depend not only on assessment outputs, such as reports, but also on the processes of communication and interaction by which these are created. Thus, planning and analysis of such assessments should deemphasize instrumental use and instead focus on the complex knowledge ‘coproduction’ processes by which diverse and interacting forms of knowledge use may be realised.
33-3342
Adaptation. Ecology. General equilibrium. Policy. Spatial planning.
This paper analyses contrasting academic understandings of ‘equilibrium resilience’ and ‘evolutionary resilience’ and investigates how these nuances are reflected within both policy and practice. We reveal that there is a lack of clarity in policy, where these differences are not acknowledged with resilience mainly discussed as a singular, vague, but optimistic aim. This opaque political treatment of the term and the lack of guidance has affected practice by privileging an equilibrist interpretation over more transformative, evolutionary measures. In short, resilience within spatial planning is characterised by a simple return to normality that is more analogous with planning norms, engineered responses, dominant interests, and technomanagerial trends. The paper argues that, although presented as a possible paradigm shift, resilience policy and practice underpin existing behaviour and normalise risk. It leaves unaddressed wider sociocultural concerns and instead emerges as a narrow, regressive, technorational frame centred on reactive measures at the building scale.
11-3 ETHICS AND VALUES
33-3343
Geography. Mobility. Politics. Rights. Spatial analysis.
Estimates suggest that tens of millions of people skateboard for transport and pleasure—it is a mobility practice both instrumental and playful. That play is important for creativity, connection, and positive affect is known. Yet skating is often typified as mere vandalism, despite the fact that, intrinsic worth aside, its hybridity is instructive: It invites consideration of the spatial politics of the street and the possibility of accommodating this and, indeed, other forms of “alternative” movement. Arguably, the prospect of such generous geographies is fundamental to ideas about the right to the city, an entitlement embracing responsibilities to one another. Nevertheless, given the ongoing dominance of automobility and widespread anxieties about skating, the tendency has been to try and contain it in parks and regulate its presence on streets, not least by creating design solutions to render it difficult to engage in. A corollary of these strategies, in combination with skaters’ own resolve to claim rights to the city, is that skaters move on to roadways. These armatures have not been designed generously to accommodate forms of mobility apart from motor vehicles—and sometimes pedestrians and cyclists. Consequently, skaters are among the millions who die on the roads annually. In relative terms, the number is minute; nevertheless, each death invokes this question: How can we mobilize a spatial politics of street skating by thinking about the geographies of generosity in ways that might avoid such events? Reflecting on that question is the purpose of this article.
11-5 APPLICATIONS/TECHNIQUES
33-3344
Analysis. Geographic patterning. Population. Population distribution. Residential districts. Space. Time.
Compactness of a congressional district is a traditional principle in adjudicating gerrymandering claims in political redistricting. During the last decade, many states have used compactness as an important criterion to constrain the presence of gerrymandering in the redistricting process. In this study, we conducted an array of spatiotemporal analyses aiming to evaluate the changes in compactness between the 112th and 113th Congressional districting plans in California and North Carolina, two states that have been well known for their heavy gerrymandering for years. We employed classic shape-based compactness measures, moment-of-inertia-based measures, and measures of partisan bias to assess the districting plans from multiple angles, including irregularity of district boundaries, spatial dispersion, population-weighted shape dispersion, and partisan symmetry. This new and combined use of spatial measures evidenced remarkable increases on the average compactness scores for California’s Congress, suggesting general alleviation of the bipartisan gerrymandering in the previous plan. On the contrary, the partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina intensified in the current map, indicated by the substantial decline in the compactness scores for a majority of the districts. Analysis of partisan bias in the districting plans suggested a very slight bias toward Democrats in California in both districting plans. In North Carolina, the partisan advantage shifted from Democrats to Republicans during redistricting. Comparative analysis between the two families of spatial measures revealed the superiority of the moment of inertia family to the classic shape-based indexes for measuring compactness of congressional districts.
33-3345
Data. Economic crisis. Humanitarianism. Mapping techniques. Maps. Participation. Public sector.
Crisis mapping is a new modality of participatory humanitarian action in which global publics are mobilized to trace digital maps of disaster-stricken sites and to classify, verify, and plot on maps Big Data produced by disaster-affected people. This article untangles the political rationalities behind this emergent form of digital humanitarianism by looking at two platforms that shape the self-organizing crowds in which crisis mapping is grounded: MicroMappers, a microtasking platform for processing messages from disaster zones, and the Missing Maps Project, which traces maps of disaster-prone areas in poor countries. While looking at the increasingly prominent interplay between device-based participation and technologies of advanced liberal governance in humanitarianism, I make two interrelated claims. First, I argue that ICTs do not promote the democratization of disaster response as much as they put at its disposal new tools for establishing order and security in crisis zones by facilitating the transfer of responsibility to humanitarian crowds. Second, I claim that the emergence of the crowd as a new humanitarian actor that serves the dual and potentially incommensurate purposes of resilience and witnessing perpetuates the ambiguities of a humanitarian endeavor whose inherent tensions had grown deeper since it gained its current political prominence.
33-3346
Digital divide. Geography. Information technology. Labor markets. Participation.
There are now more than 3 billion Internet users on our planet. The connections afforded to all of those people, in theory, allow for an unprecedented amount of communication and public participation. The goal of this article is to examine how those potentials match up to actual patterns of participation. By focusing on Wikipedia, the world’s largest and most used repository of user-generated content, we are able to gain important insights into the geographies of voice and participation. This article shows that the relative democratization of the Internet has not brought about a concurrent democratization of voice and participation. Despite the fact that it is widely used around the world, Wikipedia is characterized by highly uneven geographies of participation. The goal of highlighting these inequalities is not to suggest that they are insurmountable. Our regression analysis shows that the availability of broadband is a clear factor in the propensity of people to participate on Wikipedia. The relationship is not a linear one, though. As a country approaches levels of connectivity above about 450,000 broadband Internet connections, the ability of broadband access to positively affect participation keeps increasing. Complicating this issue is the fact that participation from the world’s economic peripheries tends to focus on editing about the world’s cores rather than their own local regions. These results ultimately point to an informational magnetism that is cast by the world’s economic cores, virtuous and vicious cycles that make it difficult to reconfigure networks and hierarchies of knowledge production.
33-3347
Mapping techniques. Maps. World cities.
It is well established that map projections make it difficult for a map reader to correctly interpret angles, distances, and areas from a world map. A single map projection cannot ensure that all of the intuitive features of Euclidean geometry, such as angles, relative distances, and relative areas, are the same on the map and in reality. This article adds an additional difficulty by demonstrating a clear pattern of naïveté regarding the site at which a route that crosses the edge of a world map reappears. The argument is that this naïve understanding of the peripheral continuation is linear, meaning that the proposed continuation is along the straight line that continues tangentially to the original route when it crosses the edge. In general, this understanding leads to an incorrect interpretation concerning the continuation of world maps. It is only in special cases—such as radial routes on a planar projection and peripherally latitudinal routes on a cylindrical or pseudocylindrical projection with a normal aspect—that the actual peripheral continuation of the world map is linear. The data used in this article are based on questionnaires administered to 670 children aged nine to fifteen and eighty-two adults. This naïve understanding of the peripheral continuation, which leads to errors, was found to be entirely dominant among the children, regardless of the projection, and was clearly observed among the adults when the projection was cylindrical with a normal aspect.
33-3348
Activity. Multivariate analysis. Space. Time. Uncertainty.
Traditional space–time paths show the spatiotemporal trajectories of individuals in one to several days. Based on data for such short periods, these space–time paths might not be able to show regular activity patterns, which are pertinent to various types of planning and policy analysis. Travel data gathered for longer periods might capture regular activity patterns, but footprints captured by these data also include irregular activities, introducing noises or uncertainty. Our objective is to determine the representative spatiotemporal trajectories of individuals, accounting for stochastic disturbances and spatiotemporal variability, but using activity data with longer duration. Therefore, we explore using Twitter data, which have relatively low and irregular spatial and temporal resolutions. This article introduces a methodology to construct individual representative space–time paths using various aggregation and spatiotemporal clustering techniques. To depict and visualize spatiotemporal trajectories with uncertain information, we propose space–time cones of variable sizes to reflect the spatial precision of the paths and use colors on the cones to represent the confidence level. To illustrate the proposed methodology, we use the geo-tagged tweets for an extended period. Our analysis indicates that the representative space–time path reasonably describes an individual’s regular activity patterns. As visual elements, cones and cone colors effectively show the varying geographical precision along the path and changing certainty levels across different path segments, respectively.
33-3349
Geographic information systems. Mapping techniques. Spatial analysis. Spatial measurement.
This article discusses spatial thinking in geographic information science (GIScience), through an empirical examination of experts’ and students’ geospatial conceptions and thematic map reading. The first study examined the structures in which GIScience concepts are conceptualized by experts and students. In experts’ conceptions, clusters for geospatial data, GIS applications, geospatial entities–operations–relations, and maps were identified. In students’ conceptions, similar clusters were observed but they were structured differently, with the terms interrelated less closely. High-spatial students’ conceptions corresponded to those of experts to a greater degree. The second study examined geospatial reasoning and showed that thematic map reading consisted of various components differing in their relationship with spatial ability. High-spatial students tackled thematic map reading by identifying more spatial distributions and comparing multiple maps more frequently. They did not necessarily make more statements about reasons for the observed patterns. It is important to distinguish spatial thinking and thinking about space, the latter of which involves geographical, beyond purely spatial, components.
33-3350
Algorithms. Globalization. Governance. Law. Technology.
The work of global governance increasingly entails some pairing of list and algorithm. Across sectors as diverse as environmental conservation, migration, nuclear nonproliferation, humanitarian aid, counterterrorism, and more, the list-plus-algorithm is, it seems, displacing rival juridical forms on the global scale. This paper probes some implications of the proliferation of this conjunctive form of ‘law’. Beginning with a typology of some types of governance work that the list-plus-algorithm is called to do on the global plane, this paper tracks movements of knowledge from the arcane form of the list into an algorithmic mode, and back again. It considers, too, some difficulties with which these configurations of lawful authority may be associated and the repertoire of techniques that international lawyers typically use to address these. Among these, the endless championing of transparency will be the focus of particular critique. Precisely as the prospect of seeing definitively through these decision-making devices seems, for a range of reasons, almost impossible to achieve, preoccupations with transparency have intensified. But what else might be entailed in making ‘public’ the governance work of these list-plus-algorithms? This paper takes up this question by focusing attention on how lists-plusalgorithms bring peoples, places, and things into lawful relation.
33-3351
Area studies. Critical geographic information systems. Politics. Regions.
At a time when nearly every topic seems to be labeled ‘‘critical’’ in geography, this essay asks why the discipline has lacked a clear commitment to advancing a ‘‘critical area studies’’ agenda. The term ‘‘critical’’ can take many meanings but, I argue, it has generally been an important way to ‘‘other’’ geography’s past, including the encyclopedism of old-fashioned regional studies. With roots in the late 1980s, the idea of joining critical theory and area studies was initially challenged by questions of representation, which are inherent in area studies scholarship. Placing power at the center of their studies, and highly conscious of their own positionality, critical geographers have lacked a coherent approach to the political and ethical issues of representation. Another difficulty lies with critical geography’s general skepticism about engaging the ‘‘policy community’’, which, especially in the US, tends to be imagined as an uncritical ‘‘other’’. Given the discipline’s cyclical anxieties about policy relevance that typically surface when funding programs are subject to cuts, this has largely resulted in US geographers speaking past these audiences. With respect to both of these othering practices, I suggest that a critical area studies project would benefit from a more positive framing, stressing ‘‘deep listening’’ in empirically informed work, and actively imagining what a critical policy community might look like.
33-3352
Inequality. Mobility. Politics. Transportation.
This introductory piece sets the context for the special issue and explains its rationale. It offers a series of reflections on the rise of the mobilities turn and its relations with preexisting research traditions, most notably transportation geography. Rather than placing different approaches in opposition and favoring one over others, we contend that all need to be seen as situated, partial, and also generative modes of abstraction. Each of these approaches makes mobility exist in specific and ultimately simplified and selective ways. In addition, we argue that geography as a pluralistic discipline will benefit from further conversations between modes of conceptualizing, theorizing, and examining mobility. We outline five lines along which such conversations can be structured: conceptualizations and analysis, inequality, politics, decentering and decolonization, and qualifying abstraction. The article concludes with discussion on three fruitful directions for future research on mobility.
33-3353
Cellular automata. China. Road networks. Urban areas.
As a vital indicator for measuring urban development, urban areas are expected to be identified explicitly and conveniently with widely available data sets, thereby benefiting planning decisions and relevant urban studies. Existing approaches to identifying urban areas are normally based on midresolution sensing data sets, low-resolution socioeconomic information (e.g., population density) in space (e.g., cells with several square kilometers or even larger towns or wards). Yet, few of these approaches pay attention to defining urban areas with high-resolution microdata for large areas by incorporating morphological and functional characteristics. This article investigates an automated framework to delineate urban areas at the block level, using increasingly available ordnance surveys for generating all blocks (or geounits) and ubiquitous points of interest (POIs) for inferring density of each block. A vector cellular automata model was adopted for identifying urban blocks from all generated blocks, taking into account density, neighborhood condition, and other spatial variables of each block. We applied this approach for mapping urban areas of all 654 Chinese cities and compared them with those interpreted from midresolution remote sensing images and inferred by population density and road intersections. Our proposed framework is proven to be more straightforward, time-saving, and fine-scaled compared with other existing ones. It asserts the need for consistency, efficiency, and availability in defining urban areas with consideration of omnipresent spatial and functional factors across cities.
33-3354
Capital accumulation. Colonialism. Critical analysis. Data. Dispossession. Life domains.
In recent years, much has been written on ‘big data’ in both the popular and academic press. After the hubristic declaration of the ‘end of theory’ more nuanced arguments have emerged, suggesting that increasingly pervasive data collection and quantification may have significant implications for the social sciences, even if the social, scientific, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared to the boosterish tone of much of its press, academic critiques of big data have been relatively muted, often focusing on the continued importance of more traditional forms of domain knowledge and expertise. Indeed, many academic responses to big data enthusiastically celebrate the availability of new data sources and the potential for new insights and perspectives they may enable. Undermining many of these critiques is a lack of attention to the role of technology in society, particularly with respect to the labor process, the continued extension of labor relations into previously private times and places, and the commoditization of more and more aspects of everyday life. In this article, we parse a variety of big data definitions to argue that it is only when individual datums by the million, billion, or more are linked together algorithmically that ‘big data’ emerges as a commodity. Such decisions do not occur in a vacuum but as part of an asymmetric power relationship in which individuals are dispossessed of the data they generate in their day-to-day lives. We argue that the asymmetry of this data capture process is a means of capitalist ‘accumulation by dispossession’ that colonizes and commodifies everyday life in ways previously impossible. Situating the promises of ‘big data’ within the utopian imaginaries of digital frontierism, we suggest processes of data colonialism are actually unfolding behind these utopic promises. Amid private corporate and academic excitement over new forms of data analysis and visualization, situating big data as a form of capitalist expropriation and dispossession stresses the urgent need for critical, theoretical understandings of data and society.
33-3355
Digital capitalism. Geographic information systems. History. Humanitarianism. Social change. United Kingdom.
Situated at the intersection of the arts and sciences, Humanities GIS (HumGIS) are contributing to new knowledge systems emerging in the digital, spatial, and geo-humanities. This article discusses the conceptualization and operationalization of two HumGIS models engaging the cartographical and discursive tools employed by James Joyce to compose Ulysses ([1922] 1992). The first model is used to perform a visual geo-literary historical analysis by transposing Homeric and Dantean topologies on a spatialized narrative of Joyce’s work. The second model integrates Ulysses within a social media map to interpret Bloomsday 2014 digital ecosystem spatial performances in Dublin and globally. This article suggests that HumGIS models reflecting human contingency, idiosyncrasy, and affect, drawing on literary, historical, and social media tools, sources, and perceptions, might offer GIScience, neogeography, and big data studies alternative spatial framings and modeling scenarios.
11-6 NEGOTIATION/MEDIATION/DISPUTE RESOLUTION
33-3356
Community. Ecosystem. Expert systems. Knowledge. Policy learning. Policy making.
The increased salience of how to value ecosystems services has driven up the demand for policy-relevant knowledge. It is clear that advice by epistemic communities can show up in policy outcomes, yet little systematic analysis exists prescribing how this can actually be achieved. This paper draws on four decades of knowledge utilization research to propose four types of ‘possible expert’ who might be influential on ecosystems services. Broad findings of a literature review on knowledge use in public policy are reported, and the four-fold conceptualisation pioneered by Carol Weiss that defines the literature is outlined. The field is then systematised by placing these four modes of knowledge use within an explanatory typology of policy learning. With how, when, and why experts and their knowledge are likely to show up in policy outcomes established, the paper then proposes the boundaries of the possible in how the ecosystems services epistemic community might navigate the challenges associated with each learning mode. Four possible experts emerge: with political antenna and epistemic humility; with the ability to speak locally and early to the hearts and minds of citizens; with a willingness to advocate policy; and, finally, with an enhanced institutional awareness and peripheral policy vision. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the utility of the analysis.
11-7 CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
33-3357
Communicative action. Infrastructure. Public participation. Spatial planning.
I investigate the field of tension between the national and the local level in spatial planning from a decision-making perspective. In doing so, I analyse the legal regulation for a large-scale 3G mobile infrastructure development in Sweden with a focus on how participation is expressed both in terms of the ‘law in books’ as well as empirically, ‘in action’. Theoretically, a model of decision making is elaborated, based on two axes: one concerning the decision level on a central or national to local scale, and one concerning what type of knowledge is regarded as the most legitimate in terms of a calculating approach versus a communicative approach. These two issues or approaches to decision making—who decides and based on what knowledge—are of direct importance for understanding the frameworks as well as the practical outcomes of public participation. The case of 3G in Sweden demonstrates how different types of knowledge are perceived as legitimate at different levels in the planning system. For example, appeals against building permits rarely change the outcome of permits issued, and appeals based on fear of electromagnetic radiation are always rejected. The juridification of a given mast conflict meant a development from a deliberative approach, where any concern is heard, to a calculating and expert-based one, where the general stance on a particular topic (such as whether or not the electromagnetic radiation from mobile masts is hazardous) is applied. This means that what knowledge is legitimate depends on where in the permit process it is presented.
33-3358
Canada. Democracy. Environmental governance. Governance. Participation.
A close examination of venues for participatory environmental governance reveals highly constrained settings for citizen engagement. This situation is documented within the broader social milieu by Skocpol as a narrowing of public life which is characterized in this paper by professional, stakeholder, and elitist forms of participatory environmental governance. Case-study evidence is presented from three different governance settings in Canada (environmental assessment, land-use planning, and forest management) identifying two distinct types of elitism: elite representation by design and elite representation by procedure. Two options are presented as a response to this analysis. One option involves accepting elitism by strengthening the linkages between stakeholders and constituencies, and the other option involves fighting elitism by drawing on modes of community-based decision, deliberative activism, and promoting research that highlights the consequences of environmental elitism.
12. Policy and Planning Administration
12-3 FISCAL PLANNING/BUDGETING
33-3359
Decentralization. Public expenditure. Regional disparities. Regional economics. Taxes.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the influence of regional economic disparities on the fiscal decentralisation processes in twenty-one OECD countries over the period 1981 to 2005. We use novel and robust measures of fiscal decentralisation based on different degrees of autonomy over both expenditures and taxes granted to subcentral governments. Our results show that high regional economic disparities call for lower fiscal decentralisation. This could be interpreted as the outcome of a bargaining process driven by the relative strength and different incentives of rich and poor regions. Moreover, the extent to which responsibility and decision powers are really left to subcentral governments appears to be crucial. Thus, from a positive point of view, equity considerations seem to suggest avoidance of fiscal decentralisation processes in countries with significant regional economic disparities, notwithstanding the well-known efficiency gains.
12-4 POLICY ANALYSIS
33-3360
Economy. European Union. Financing. Knowledge base.
The Lisbon Agenda was meant to make the European Union ‘the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy (KBE) in the world’ by 2010. As that date has now come and gone, it is apt to ask whether the Lisbon Agenda achieved its objective. We engage with this very question by analyzing new empirical material on the supposed transition to a KBE. Theoretically, we problematize the very notion that EU policies promoted the emergence of a KBE by highlighting how the Lisbon Agenda was tied to the financialization of the European economy. Our findings illustrate the abject failure of the EU’s decade-long strategy to foster a new economy and better employment opportunities. We show that the main winners of the EU’s economic strategy have been the finance sector and those who work in it. In summary, we argue that, despite the earlier assurances of Bell and Drucker, it is not the scientist or engineer but the banker who has been empowered to command a higher price in the new world of the KBE.
33-3361
Ecosystem. Knowledge. Policy. Public policy. Services. United Kingdom.
The ‘ecosystem services approach’ (ESA) to policy making has refocused attention on how knowledge is embedded in policy. Appraisal has long been identified as an important venue for embedding, but suffers from well-known difficulties. This paper examines the extent to which an ESA appears in UK policy appraisal documents, and how far implementing an ESA via appraisal may encounter the same difficulties. A clear understanding of this is vital for interrogating claims that improving knowledge necessarily leads to more sustainable ecosystem management. The paper reports on the content of seventy-five national-level policy appraisals undertaken in the United Kingdom between 2008 and 2012. Only some elements of an ESA appear, with even the environment ministry failing to systematically pick up the concept, which is indeed subject to many of the familiar barriers to embedding environmental knowledge in appraisals. Policy initiatives attempting to institutionalise ecosystem values need to be conversant with these barriers.
12-5 POLITICS AND PLANNING
33-3362
Advocacy coalition. European Union. Management. Strategic planning.
Using original data from a survey conducted in 2012, we apply theoretical insights from the literature on strategic alliances to explore Brussels-based corporate lobbyists’ perceptions of prospective political partners. We find these perceptions to be driven primarily by strategic considerations. We also uncover instances where the size and nationality of respondents’ firms influence their partner evaluations. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that respondents’ assessments of lobbying partners are shaped by EU institutional arrangements. Whilst extant literature suggests information and relationships are important preconditions for successful EU lobbying, we expose the specific circumstances when seeking access to these—and other political resources—that can influence corporate lobbyists’ perceptions of their partners. Combined, our findings respond to a concern that scholars of interest coalitions focus on why firms lobby in coalitions whilst overlooking how they select their lobbying partners.
33-3363
Capitalism. Class. Class analysis. Land. Resistance.
This article explores the importance of non-capitalist space within the global political economy. The issue of how to categorise and understand space in so-called peripheral regions such as Latin America has been a contentious one. Whilst many radical analyses have focused on the dynamics of capitalism in relation to the geography of development, explaining how it has been able to survive and grow, this article makes the case for a more multi-linear theoretical framework with which to view the socio-economic landscape. This is inspired not only by the later writings of Marx but also the specific Marxian class analysis of those involved in Rethinking Marxism. Via a focus on Oaxaca in southern Mexico, this article highlights both the survival and the recreation of spaces of non-capitalism, and provides an argument for why we should consider these to be important for transformative action more broadly, whilst also discussing their potential limitations.
33-3364
Governance. Institutions. Learning. Planning practices. social learning.
Scenario praxis, critically explored as the theory-informed practice of scenarioing, is proposed as a modality for institutionalising knowing within a systemic governance framework. Framing and institutional considerations associated with a constructivist inquiry-based learning approach that might open capacity for innovation in future scenarioing praxis are outlined to complement and counterbalance positivistoriented evidence-based approaches. Drawing on espoused theoretical and epistemological commitments, background literature, researcher experience, and our framing choices, we describe a heuristic device for use ex post to critically examine accounts of past scenario development, or ex ante to generate scenarios. The heuristic and its process of generation are designed for use in context-sensitive ways suited to the systemic governance of climate change adaptation and similar situations that can be framed as ‘wicked’ or uncertain.
33-3365
Nuclear concerns. Planning strategies. Politics. Power. Reform.
This paper explores the relationship between ‘postpolitics’ and processes of rescaling enacted through planning reform. It centres empirically on the policy shift which has occurred in planning since the inception of the Planning Act 2008—the new framework which will oversee the development of new nuclear power and other large-scale infrastructural developments in the UK. This act has radically altered the ways in which publics can engage with government policy. Using interview data gathered from participants in recent nuclear power consultations, as well as participants in the old inquiry-based system of the 1980s, it is argued that processes of rescaling through the Planning Act have diminished the ‘political opportunities’ available for certain nongovernmental actors to intervene in the policy process. This has contributed to the postpoliticisation of the planning framework in certain arenas, which raises significant questions concerning public engagement and democratic accountability within the wider context of the modernization of planning. The potential consequences of these developments are discussed.
33-3366
Academics. Geography. Military. Spatial analysis.
The discipline of geography has a long albeit uneven engagement with militarism. This is witnessed in the on-going efforts of geographers to influence military policy as well as the development of technologies used in military action. This forum, based on papers originally presented at the 2014 Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Tampa, Florida, provides a critical introduction to contemporary issues related to geographies of militarism. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that geographers located within the nonmilitary academy have failed to reflect adequately on the implications of militarism on the discipline. Consequently, we forward the argument that the American Association of Geographers must initiate a review of the relationship between academic geography and militarism.
33-3367
Algorithms. Database modeling. Mining. War.
Alongside drones and Special Forces, the ‘disposition matrix’ – a kill/capture list and database – is a key device in the US government’s global ‘war on terror’, in which targeting individuals has become increasingly institutionalized. The majority of studies to date have focused on the human world of the military, insurgents and policy makers with a limited access to reliable knowledge. Using insights from technoscience and software studies, I seek here to develop a material-based perspective focusing on the neglected non-human world of software artefacts, which codify, standardize and sort our world. I will first present available knowledge about the ‘disposition matrix’ and the ‘targeting methodology’. Second, I will elaborate on the materiality of databases and data mining algorithms, showing how their technorationality is built on recombination, which fosters the production of possible future targets for a data-driven killing apparatus, in which human and non-human decision-making processes are intimately intertwined. In the third part of my article, I will discuss how computational actors make the messy targeting process more opaque and less traceable – not at least because of their underlying technorationality with its open-ended search heuristics – which advances a possibilistic, preemptive culture of technosecurity.
14. Planning and Society
14-1 POVERTY
33-3368
Europe. Homelessness. Space.
This paper focuses on the controversy over nationwide homeless statistics in Germany and uses the conflict as a window through which to explore the spatial and historical ontology of political numbers. Since the 1980s, the German national government’s refusal to collect statistical data on homelessness has pushed homeless advocates to fight for quantitative assessments of homelessness as a crucial form of recognition. The conflict has produced a series of studies concerned with the practicability of homeless statistics. These studies offer an insight into the critical relations between space and calculation and the governmental problematizations of calculable territory and populations. Problematizations of space in feasibility studies reflect how the phenomenon of homelessness is not only a social issue ignored by governmental knowledge production, but a real obstacle to conventional ways of data collection on the population. To analyse the controversy and the difficulties of establishing homeless statistics, the paper combines theoretical reflections on the relations between numbers and politics and on spaces of calculation with more recent attempts to highlight the political nature of ignorance. The paper argues that the difficulties to count homeless people represent a case of ‘ontological ignorance’ connected to modern sedentariness.
33-3369
Mobility. Poverty. Transportation.
Fluid interdependencies of mobility—physical and virtual—are growing rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa: The remarkable expansion of mobile phone networks is bringing a tangible new dimension of connectivity into mobility, transport, and access equations on the ground. This article draws on in-depth field research, including co-investigation with two groups often disadvantaged in their physical mobility, youth and older people, to explicate some current African developments and their departure from prevailing Western-based conceptualizations of space–time interactions (regarding the potential for space–time flexibility and microcoordination afforded by mobile phones). Despite the fact that face-to-face interaction is often of great significance in Africa, when the value attached to personalized relationships is balanced against factors of widespread poverty and irregular, sometimes very dangerous transport, the potential for phone substitution appears greater than in many Western contexts. Better distance management through phone use could be particularly closely associated with populations with very low disposable incomes or those whose physical mobility is limited; for instance, by disability, infirmity, age, or gender.
14-3 SPECIAL POPULATIONS/SOCIAL WELFARE
33-3370
Citizenship. Human rights. Youth.
The case of Slovenia’s erased minority populations (Izbrisani) is cited as one of the worst human rights abuses in contemporary Europe. While engaging debates on the nation-state and neoliberalism, this article discusses the struggles of Izbrisani youth from 1992 to the present day through a consideration of the spatial effects of erasure, including trauma to families forced apart and young people locked in place. Theoretical insights are drawn from Agamben’s ideas about bare life, Rancière’s politicization of aesthetics, and Žižek’s notion of radical ethical acts, which respectively provide lenses for understanding Izbrisani youth privations, awakenings, and transformations.
33-3371
Africa. Geographic information systems. Livelihoods. Space. Time. Transportation.
The adverse effect of mobility restrictions on the livelihood of economically marginalized women in rural Africa is considerable. This study investigates the space–time paths of twenty-seven widowed women in rural Uganda through methodological pluralism that integrates multiple sources of quantitative and qualitative data collected from Global Positioning System tracking, in-depth interviews, and participant observation. Geographic information systems mapping of activity space suggests that mobility patterns are characterized by frequent short repetitive trips and less flexible space–time budgets. In turn, this reduces opportunities to pursue diversified sources of income that enhance livelihood. Statistical regressions and qualitative interviews also show, however, that access to use of motorized vehicles such as cars and motorcycle taxis significantly strengthens livelihood by reducing time poverty, rendering time as a resource for pursuing income opportunities.
14-4 URBAN SOCIOLOGY
33-3372
Feminism. Urban theory. Urbanization.
In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of ‘the urban’ and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for urban theory. Our intervention in these debates, which to date have focused primarily on Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis regarding ‘planetary urbanization’, highlights the absence of an engagement with the long legacy within feminist urban scholarship of confronting and dismantling the categories of the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. We argue that attending to this legacy foregrounds two conceptual and intellectual challenges that Lefebvre sets for us in his writings on the urban phenomenon. The first relates to Lefebvre’s arguments about the central role that a focus on difference and everyday life must play in understanding late capitalist urbanization and the urban condition. The second relates to Lefebvre’s articulation of the simultaneous problem and imperative of epistemological plurality within urban theory, including the role he ascribed to intellectual cooperation on the study of the urban phenomenon. We conclude by offering some thoughts on the importance Lefebvre attached to residual forms of difference – both lived and epistemological – in urban research and action, and by extension, probe some of the limits of Lefebvrian frameworks for understanding the contemporary urban condition.
33-3373
Construction. Politics. Urban areas. Urban sociology.
This paper seeks to position construction as a platform and practice for the articulation of a new type of urban politics. The argument is presented in four steps, and each supported by an analysis of the work of social movement Grupo Independiente Rosarino Organizado Solidariamente (GIROS) in Rosario. The first part describes how construction introduces prefiguration as a means of reconfiguring the spatialities and temporalities of urban politics. The second part presents an analysis of the processes of de-institutionalisation and de-commodification that emerge from the involvement of urban social movements with construction practices in peripheral settlements. I then illustrate how the politicisation of construction operates through a simultaneous recuperation of what is described as techno-popular knowledges and a disruption of hegemonic constructive epistemologies. Lastly, the paper introduces the notion of material articulation to examine how construction, as a prefigurative tactic, is used to formulate alternative urban political programmes. The part presents a brief conceptual history of the notion of articulation and argues for the need to deepen current trends that seek to expand its restrictive association with language and institutionalised politics. The paper concludes by addressing how material articulations are reconfiguring the content, agencies and spatialities of political action.
33-3374
City hierarchies. Place. Urban theory.
This article draws on several empirical regularities underlying central place theory (CPT) to enhance understanding of the uneven distribution of invention in the U.S. city system, especially the immense array of specializations that comprise national technological advance. CPT depicts city systems as collections of places in which functions expand in number as city size increases. Small cities have few functions and large cities many. A long-term hierarchical system is successively inclusive if large cities have all of the functions of smaller cities and some additional ones. The functions investigated here are 399 patent classes distributed across 366 U.S. metropolitan areas in the period from 2000 to 2011. Evidence is strong that patent classes with large numbers of awards are widely spread across the city system. This leads to the average sizes of places active in generating patents in the robust classes to be significantly smaller compared with the average sizes of areas that generate patents in unusual classes. Small cities are tied to national technological advance through the generation of patents in the most active and ubiquitous inventive specialties. Inventors in large cities are more likely to invent in unusual domains. Bigger areas are significantly more diversified compared with smaller ones. The system is not, however, strictly successively inclusive. Whereas 88.3 percent of all patent class–area pairs are generated in at least 50 percent of equally sized and bigger areas, only 20.5 percent of pairs are 100 percent strictly hierarchical.
14-5 RURAL SOCIOLOGY
33-3375
Alternative economics. Food. Food production. Politics. Sovereignty.
Recent scholarship highlights the play of biopower in and through policies and practices shaping food systems, but says little about the practices of resistance to such power. Alternative food movements mobilize critique of and resistance to an industrialized food system from many perspectives. This article examines food sovereignty activism in Maine as an illuminating instance of contemporary biopolitics. This article investigates a “food sovereignty ordinance” passed in eleven towns in Maine since 2011 as an important moment in the biopolitical struggle over the nature of food systems. The ordinance exempts direct transactions of farm food from licensure and inspection in an effort to maintain the viability of small, diversified farms in a struggling rural economy. The ordinance effectively carves out a space of food sovereignty in each town that enacts it, thereby protecting conditions of life and livelihood within local food networks. The analysis focuses on the spatiality of the practices that comprise biopolitics, with attention to the scalar politics in play as well; that is, the ways in which modalities of power shape and are shaped by social, economic, and political scales of organization. This exploration of the scaling of biopolitics in relation to the concept of food sovereignty suggests insights into the contours of other moments of struggle over food regulations.
33-3376
Food. Food industry. Food production. Politics. Sovereignty.
Recent scholarship highlights the play of biopower in and through policies and practices shaping food systems, but says little about the practices of resistance to such power. Alternative food movements mobilize critique of and resistance to an industrialized food system from many perspectives. This article examines food sovereignty activism in Maine as an illuminating instance of contemporary biopolitics. This article investigates a “food sovereignty ordinance” passed in eleven towns in Maine since 2011 as an important moment in the biopolitical struggle over the nature of food systems. The ordinance exempts direct transactions of farm food from licensure and inspection in an effort to maintain the viability of small, diversified farms in a struggling rural economy. The ordinance effectively carves out a space of food sovereignty in each town that enacts it, thereby protecting conditions of life and livelihood within local food networks. The analysis focuses on the spatiality of the practices that comprise biopolitics, with attention to the scalar politics in play as well; that is, the ways in which modalities of power shape and are shaped by social, economic, and political scales of organization. This exploration of the scaling of biopolitics in relation to the concept of food sovereignty suggests insights into the contours of other moments of struggle over food regulations.
33-3377
Gentrification. Immigration. Labor markets. Migration. Rural areas.
This article examines the emergence of immigrant-based precarious labor regimes in U.S. rural areas undergoing gentrification. Drawing on field-based research in rural Georgia and Colorado, we explore how Latino and Latina immigrant workers were recruited to places that had been largely off the map of Latino immigrant settlement prior to the late 1990s to work in service and construction employment stimulated by gentrification. We trace evolving recruitment and labor practices that drew on hierarchies of race and “illegality” to fundamentally improve the productivity and profitability of gentrification-linked sectors. Key to this process was the active recruitment of Latino workers in the 1990s and early 2000s (usually recruited off subcontracted crews hired out from distant metropolitan areas) and the establishment of personal relations of loyalty and dependence between those workers and their white bosses. Over time, these personal relationships often produced informal labor brokers for business owners, brokers who facilitated access to immigrant networks necessary for further recruitment of immigrant workers and critical to producing the high degree of flexibility and discipline that began to characterize these emerging labor regimes. Our analysis makes two key theoretical contributions. First, by exploring how precarious labor regimes become instantiated into rural spaces we decenter the urban in our understanding of these regimes as theorized by Theodore and others. Second, we highlight the importance of attending to the imbrication of class, race, and “illegality” in rural gentrification research.
14-6 CRIME/DELINQUENCY
33-3378
Architecture. Drug trafficking. South America.
The term narcotecture often refers to grand mansions built with drug money. A blend of the words ‘‘narcotics’’ and ‘‘architecture,’’ the portmanteau evokes florid gated communities in Afghanistan, Africa, and the Americas. Yet, this interest in ostentation strips narcotecture of full analytical purchase. To expand the term’s significance, this article samples how the global drug trade interacts every day with the War on Drugs at the level of built environments. This interaction makes flashy mansions, to be sure, but also airplane hangars and shipping containers, security booths and watch towers, drop sites and crack houses—not to mention prisons, hospitals, and barracks. This broader notion of narcotecture is organized by the tactical manipulation of space pursued in ways that self-consciously attempt to avoid detection. This article’s central claim is that narcotecture is not simply a form of conspicuous consumption but more importantly a mode of inconspicuous construction.
33-3379
Action theory. Displacement. Gender. Gender differences. Mobility. Participatory research. Violence.
Drawing from geo-ethnographic data collected during a participatory action research (PAR) project funded by the National Science Foundation and subsequent research conducted in Colombia with marginalized youth populations, this article explores the sociospatial exclusion and (im)mobility of the oppressed, subjugated, and persecuted through the social cartographies, geo-narratives, and auto-photographic images of transgender sex workers that were displaced by paramilitary-led gender-based violence and forced to leave their birth cities and rural communities in Colombia at an early age. As is the case for thousands of victims of the armed conflict in Colombia, displaced transgender populations seek refuge and opportunity in the streets of Bogotá, Colombia. The (im)mobilities of transgender sex workers are explored in two stages—the forced, violent mobilities of their displacement, followed by their experiences of discrimination, sociospatial exclusion, and persecution through hate crimes and social cleansing killings on arrival in Bogotá. This article discusses how research actors constructed their own spaces of cohesion and resistance to the multifaceted discrimination and marginalization from mainstream urban society through PAR. The PAR project presented in this article continues as part of the broader struggle of transgender sex workers to challenge the exclusionary discourses and praxis that limit their mobilities and autonomy in the city. This article concludes with examples of how research actors use the action-driven elements of PAR to negotiate, analyze, and resist the relationships of power and violence embedded within their urban environment and begin to re-present and change the reality of their immobility within the city.
14-7 HEALTH/EDUCATION/SOCIAL SERVICES
33-3380
Built environment. Economic restructuring. Health. Labor markets. Social development.
Since 2003, more than twenty hospitals in New York City have closed because of debt and a state-driven downsizing program. During this same time period, the labor market for nurses has tightened substantially, shifting from an overall nurse shortage since the 1980s to a job shortage since the mid-2000s. Drawing on an analysis of media and government publications on hospital closures since 2003 and interviews with nurses working in the metropolitan area, I argue that hospital closures and the new job shortage are intertwined. By pushing an austerity agenda in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, New York City and state government agencies as well as private health care institutions are actively restructuring—or “rightsizing”—the health care sector. Ultimately, this is a downsizing of care provisions by another name. Capitalism’s continued devaluation of social reproduction manifests in New York City as a restructuring of the spaces and work of health care. Hospital closures are central to this restructuring that involves the mutually constituted transformations in the built environment, health care provisioning, and the nursing profession. In conclusion, this process risks making good health and good jobs less accessible.
33-3381
Africa. AIDS. Biological analysis. Ecology. Health. Politics.
South Africa is known for its high rates of HIV and tuberculosis (TB), where HIV has provided fertile ground for the transmission of TB. Indeed, HIV–TB coinfection is widely understood as one of the, if not the, biggest health problems in the country. In practice, doctors and nurses understand that unusual cases of tuberculosis indicate HIV and they make diagnosis and treatment plans accordingly. International treatment standards and protocols inform this practice as doctors pay little attention to individual people and the political–economic, cultural, social, and environmental contexts in which they live. Political ecology, with its nested, place-based analysis, provides an excellent framework for understanding health in South Africa in the context of poverty; local understandings; and global policies, protocols, and priorities. To develop a political ecology of health, this article builds on the concept of local biologies, which understands health at the community scale as simultaneously biological, cultural, and social. Illustrated with the story of one HIV-negative woman’s case of miliary TB, this article incorporates local biologies into a political ecology of health that mobilizes scales from the global to the “internal ecologies” of individual bodies. Centering its analysis on the place of the body, this article offers surprising insights into the HIV/AIDS epidemic. By examining the science of miliary tuberculosis alongside population-scale understandings of HIV–TB coinfection in a specific context, this article challenges the way we understand the health impacts of HIV/AIDS, suggesting that the epidemic has negative health implications even for those who are HIV negative.
14-8 PLANNING AND GENDER/RACE/ETHNICITY
33-3382
Class. Mobility. Racism. Sports.
This article explores spatial mobility as a form of African American resistance and self-determination. We argue for examining the everyday activism and “countermobility work” of ordinary people of color as they move in ways that subvert, negotiate, and survive white supremacy. These ideas are developed through a historical case study not typically identified with the black civil rights struggle, specifically the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) and the “hard driving” of Wendell Scott. The first and only African American driver to win at NASCAR’s top level, Scott raced throughout the segregated South and faced considerable discrimination in what was otherwise an all-white sport. We offer a critical (re)reading of Scott’s racing career as antiracism mobility work and focus on the bodily, social, and technological practices he employed to maintain and even enhance his mobility around tracks and to and from races. Scott did not represent his efforts in terms of civil rights activism, but it is important to contextualize black resistance outside the confines of formal protest to include the struggle for survivability and material reproduction. The work of racing and driving was part of Scott’s geographically situated political practice and important to the struggle to access and move about the sport of stock car track racing and hence the larger U.S. landscape of citizenship. Our discussion has implications for analyzing historic practices of resistance but also has currency for understanding how countermobility practices remain central to resisting continuing racial discrimination.
33-3383
Colonialism. Military. Racism. United States.
We argue that understanding contemporary geographies of race and militarism is predicated on understandings of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Settler colonialism is a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, settler colonialism begins with the removal of first peoples from the land and the creation of racialized and gendered labor systems that make the land productive for the colonizers. In this context, settler colonialism is an enduring structure—an interrelated political, social, and economic process that continuously unfolds—requiring continued reconfigurations and interventions by the state. Such a framing connects landscapes of militarism and geopolitics with everyday forms of violence, social difference, and normalized power hierarchies and relationships of oppression. Building from these insights we argue that theorizations of U.S. militarism must be connected to the spatialities of white supremacy and grounded in the U.S. imperial settler state. Finally, we end by engaging with a broader discussion on the ways in which the discipline and academic institutions are complicit in practices that contribute to white supremacy, poverty, inequality, and the continuation of settler colonial practices. For these reasons it is necessary to cultivate a broadly conceived and militantly uncompromising peace agenda premised on antiviolence and the rejection of the racism (and its intersections with gender, class, and sexuality) implicit in the settler colonial state.
33-3384
Immigrants. Immigration. Immigration control. Mobility.
In this article, we explore how racialized constructions of a “Latin@ threat” serve as ideological underpinning for the practices of the U.S. deportability regime and also fuel broader practices of policeability, with consequences for Latin@ mobilities and immobilities. Drawing from ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with Latin@s in Perry, Iowa, we discuss “the border within” as an extension of border politics and borderlands rhetorics to the U.S. heartland, explore imposed mobilities and immobilities, and also recognize tactical immobilities and altermobilities undertaken by Latin@s.
33-3385
Ethnicity. Segregation. Spatial analysis.
Most world cities can now be characterized as multiethnic and multicultural in their population composition, and the residential patterning of their major component ethnic groups remains a topic of substantial research interest. Many studies of the degree of residential segregation of ethnic groups recognize that this is multiscalar in its composition, but few have incorporated this major feature into their analyses: Those that do mostly conclude that segregation is greater at the microscale than at the macroscale. This article uses a recently developed alternative procedure for assessing the degree of segregation that differs from all others in that it analyzes the geography of all groups simultaneously, providing a single, synoptic view of their relative segregation; can incorporate data for more than one date and therefore evaluate the statistical significance of the extent of any change over time; operates at several geographical scales, allowing appreciation of the extent of clustering and congregation for the various ethnic groups at different levels of spatial resolution; and—most important—is based on a firm statistical foundation that allows for robust assessments of differences in the levels of segregation for different groups between each other at different scales over time. This modeling procedure is illustrated by a three-scale analysis of ethnic residential segregation in Auckland, New Zealand, as depicted by the country’s 2001, 2006, and 2013 censuses.
33-3386
Differences. Feminism. Transnationalism. World cities.
In this essay, I consider the relationship between transnational feminism and area studies. I suggest that transnational feminism’s long engagement with the difference offers a way in which to address the critiques of area studies which has tended to identify places with particular ‘‘traits’’. I examine how particular strands of western feminism intertwined with the project of area studies by seeking to define, reform, and consolidate places and people within their ambit of power. If we consider area studies to be organized in a horizontal scale focused on large regional spaces defined by ‘‘traits’’, then transnational feminism adds a vertical dimension to the study of area studies with its focus on the intimate spaces of power.
33-3387
Commuting. Inequality. Protests. Racial inequality. Transportation. Urban areas.
The iconic image of Rosa Parks sitting at the front of a bus documents the most famous commute in history. Rosa Parks was traveling home from work when she refused to give her seat to a white passenger in 1955, an act of civil disobedience that set the Montgomery bus boycott in motion and propelled civil rights onto the national stage. Sixty years later, cities in the putatively postracial era continue to generate profound racial inequalities. Drawing on Rosa Parks’s defiant commute as a framing device, I situate the journey to work as a racial mobility project that extends from historic urban processes of racial discrimination, reveals lived experiences of intersectional inequality, and generates future racial disparities. I define commuting as a racial mobility project that organizes, redistributes, and mobilizes resources along racial lines in conjunction with the movement of bodies across space. This framework links the discourses of race and mobility, both of which highlight the dynamics of politics and power. By positioning the journey to work as a racial mobility project, this article seeks to resituate the commute for geographers—conceptually, empirically, and politically—at the nexus of geography, mobility, and the struggle for racial justice in the city.
33-3388
Commuting. Gender. Racial inequality. United States.
In the 1990s, many women commuted shorter distances and less time than men, and research underscored the pernicious effects of racial and ethnic segregation and access to transportation on minority women’s commuting. Since then, growing income inequality and the bifurcation of employment between well-paid and secure jobs and a growing number of insecure and poorly paid jobs have been accompanied by the concentration of jobs at central and suburban locations and the transformation of women’s roles in the labor market. We investigate some of the geographical implications of these trends by analyzing commuting in the New York metropolitan region. In 2010, gender and race differences in commuting varied across the metropolitan area. Regression analysis demonstrates that the impacts of wages and household composition on commuting differ between the highly valued center that has benefited from private and public investment, the suburbs where traditional gender roles persist, and the deteriorating inner ring where minority women still commute long times on slow public transit. The findings highlight racial and gender disparities in geographical access to employment within the metropolitan region.
33-3389
Activism. Area studies. Ethics. Feminism. Geography. Place. Sexuality.
In rethinking area studies, I argue for a more open approach to standpoint theory, one that is rooted in a feminist ethics of care. The latter’s commitment to intimate knowing, and its problematisation of the distance between self and other, allows for a more relational approach to place. By drawing from feminist care ethics, it thus becomes possible to address criticisms of essentialism and distancing that place-based standpoint theory is also charged with. I address these theoretical debates as a researcher from an ‘Area’ who ‘never left’; and within the context of my own struggles with knowing how to place, and distance myself as an academic and member of the LGBTQ activist community in Singapore.
33-3390
Feminism. Politics. Racism.
In this essay, I aim to make two closely connected, intersecting and in some cases parallel scholarly and political contributions to wider discussions about area studies through a focused engagement with Caribbean Area Studies. First, I position myself within Caribbean (area) studies as a feminist anti-racist researcher and scholar. I explore the im/possibilities of my role within the ‘‘area’’ of the Caribbean through a feminist analysis. Second, I aim to ensure that the scholarship from academics within and of the Caribbean is placed central. I provide insights from Caribbean theorists who discuss the ways in which the region is both bounded and exploded but nevertheless a recognisable entity of Caribbean area studies.
15. Development Planning
15-2 SMALL TOWN/RURAL DEVELOPMENT
33-3391
China. Evolution. Rural development.
Regional economic development is inherently uneven as determined by the local conditions and available resources. Specialized villages (SVs) in China played a very important role in the development and economic transformation in rural areas. By integrating regional spatial structure theory, multilevel network theory, and spatial interface theory, this article examines the spatial and temporal evolution of SVs in Henan Province, China. Results from the analyses show that the development of SVs over time progressed in four stages, each corresponding to important adjustments in national agricultural policy. SVs were distributed unevenly in space and the distribution seemed to be scale-dependent. At a macrolevel, SVs displayed a dispersed pattern over a large area. SVs showed localized clusters at a microlevel, however, also exhibiting a core–periphery structure. Rural economic development in China showed that SVs formed a multilevel network hierarchy. We also observed that SVs were often in transitional areas including urban–rural and plain–mountain interfaces and administrative marginal zones. Finally, spatiotemporal clusters of SVs helped to identify the locations and time periods when SVs grew significantly for analysis of impacts by national policies on rural development.
15-3 REGIONAL PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
33-3392
Economic development. Land. Regional growth. Universities.
Land-grant universities are distinctly American institutions of higher education in two respects. First, the establishment of a land-grant university was an independent act by the US federal government that endowed specific counties across the country with a university. Second, their mission of inclusion, with an emphasis on the agricultural and mechanic arts, was designed to educate the industrial class for professional life. Despite these institutions’ unique founding and mission, however, land-grant universities have received little specific attention in the broader literature on university impacts. Given the comparatively little attention devoted to these institutions, the goal of this study is to use a descriptive and exploratory quasi-experimental analysis to evaluate the potential impacts of land-grant institutions on their local communities. The results of this analysis suggest that land-grant universities do impact their local communities, but that these impacts did not begin to appear until approximately sixty years after their initial founding.
16. International Planning
16-1 DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
33-3393
Disaster. Infrastructure. Mobility. Natural disasters. Network analysis.
Drawing on research in postearthquake Haiti, with reference to other postdisaster situations, this article examines how uneven mobility and communication systems often reinforce unequal distributions of network capital and thereby reproduce uneven physical and informational space. The reflexive mobile methodology highlights how postdisaster humanitarian mobilizations, including interventions by diaspora members and researchers, could inadvertently intensify uneven access to blended physical and digital infrastructures. Focusing on the intersection of disaster logistics with systems for mobile communication, remote data collection, aerial vision technologies, and data visualizations assisted by satellites and aerial photography, the article draws on two specific local examples of contested water and energy infrastructure to explore how recipients of international aid contest unequal network capital and struggle against the reproduction of uneven spatialities and mobilities. In conclusion, it suggests that critical awareness of uneven network capital and more reflexive efforts to build connectivity across differentiated mobility systems, communication platforms, and scales might help lessen the negative retrenching of differential mobilities during postdisaster recovery.
16-6 TRANSNATIONAL PLANNING
33-3394
Borders. Human rights. Surveillance. Technology. Terrain.
This paper explores US Department of Homeland Security surveillance programs in the United States/Mexico borderlands, with an emphasis on the quotidian role of a dynamic more-than-human landscape in frustrating the department’s enforcement practices and ambitions. The paper is based on several years’ ethnographic research in southern Arizona, archival research, and semi-structured interviews with current and former government personnel. By unpacking the quotidian challenges confronted by Homeland Security personnel, the paper contributes to a post-humanist theory of terrain, shifting the focus of geographic inquiry to the ways that the qualities of certain spaces, objects, and conditions may resist or impede everyday navigation, centralized vision or administrative practice. Yet, as the long saga of Department of Homeland Security surveillance initiatives would suggest, the impediments of terrain are by no means final or determinant. To think through this indeterminacy and its implications for the geographic composition of state practice, the paper proposes that the latter be approached ‘‘metabolically,’’ with state security and surveillance practices continuously animated by a dynamic exterior as agents and agencies seek to overcome tactical and strategic limitations by incorporating, digesting and subjecting ever-greater kinds and volumes of objects, bodies, landscapes, and data to centralized legibility and control.
METHODOLOGY/QUANTITATIVE/ECONOMIC/QUALITATIVE
20. Methodology
20-1 MATHEMATICAL MODELS
33-3395
Asia. Environmental modeling. Travel.
This article explores how to incorporate a spatial dependence effect into the standard multilevel modeling (MLM). The proposed method is particularly well suited to the analysis of geographically clustered survey data where individuals are nested in geographical areas. Drawing on multivariate conditional autoregressive models, we develop a spatial random slope MLM approach to account for the within-group dependence among individuals in the same area and the spatial dependence between areas simultaneously. Our approach improves on recent methodological advances in the integrated spatial and MLM literature, offering greater flexibility in terms of model specification by allowing regression coefficients to be spatially varied. Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are derived to implement the proposed model. Using two-level travel satisfaction data in Beijing, we apply the proposed approach as well as the standard nonspatial random slope MLM to investigate subjective travel satisfaction of residents and its determinants. Model comparison results show strong evidence that the proposed method produces a significant improvement against a nonspatial random slope MLM. A fairly large spatial correlation parameter suggests strong spatial dependence in district-level random effects. Moreover, spatial patterns of district-level random effects of locational variables have been identified, with high and low values clustering together.
20-2 INFORMATION AND TECHNOLOGY
33-3396
Cellular automata. Remote sensing. Telecommunications.
At the end of 2014, over 93 percent of the world’s population owned cellular phones, with penetration rates that exceeded 100 percent in most developed countries. Mobile phones have become an integral part of our lives and have had a significant impact on society—including on individuals’ daily movement and mobility patterns. Cellular phones have also been used for research and have been employed to collect time–space data about the mobility of relatively large populations. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the potential of advanced mobile phones—known as smartphones—in the investigation of the geographies of mobility. We discuss how these devices can be employed in research, tracking individuals in time and space and functioning as location-aware survey tools in real time, among other things. We also engage in a debate over the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of smartphones in this context and highlight new research trends that are beginning to appear following the introduction of smartphones.
20-3 STATISTICS/ECONOMETRICS
33-3397
Demographics. Population. Spatial distribution. United States.
In this article we explore methods for tracking and disaggregating five alternately defined mean and median center points of population, measures that can help in interpreting the forces underlying shifting settlement patterns. We argue that the point that minimizes the sum of squared great circle distances is more conceptually appealing than the center point located via the method currently employed by the U.S. Census Bureau. We also suggest that the point of minimum aggregate distance—as deployed in many other geographic applications—provides an interesting alternative to the median center historically used in population analysis, which is the crossing point of the medial lines of latitude and longitude. We then propose methods to disaggregate any of the alternatively defined center points into multiple points useful for tracking and comparing the relative influences of each of the components of population change: births, deaths, domestic (or internal) migration, and immigration. Similarly, we track and examine the shifting locations of the center points of various age, sex, and race or ethnicity groups. In a final section, we suggest that the increasing average and standard distances of individuals from the median and mean centers result from the increasingly bicoastal distribution of the U.S. population. As summary measures of all of the changes in population occurring anywhere across the nation’s land area, centers of population provide an interesting conceptual platform for drilling into the variegated geographic patterns and disparate demographic forces that underlie a country’s population distribution.
20-5 QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS
33-3398
Complexity theory. Computer systems. Data. Geographical analysis. Quantitative analysis. Theory-practice relations.
Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work by physicists on topics outside their traditional research domain, including geography. We explore the scope of this development, place it in a historical context dating back at least to statistical physics in the nineteenth century and trace the origins of more recent developments to the roots of computational science after World War II. Our primary purpose is not historical, however. Instead, we are concerned with understanding what geographers can learn from the many recent contributions by physicists to understanding spatiotemporal systems. Drawing on examples of work in this tradition by physicists, we argue that two apparently different modes of investigation are common: model-driven and data-driven approaches. The former is associated with complexity science, whereas the latter is more commonly associated with the fourth paradigm, more recently known as “big data.” Both modes share technical strengths and, more important, a capacity for generalization, which is absent from much work in geography. We argue that although some of this research lacks an appreciation of previous geographical contributions, when assessed critically, it nevertheless brings useful new perspectives, new methods, and new ideas to bear on topics central to geography, yet neglected in the discipline. We conclude with some suggestions for how geographers can build on these new approaches, both inside and outside the discipline.
21. Population
21-2 POPULATION PLANNING
33-3399
Geographic information systems. Population. Spatial analysis.
This article proposes a general framework for modeling population distributions in space and time. This is particularly pertinent to a growing range of applications that require spatiotemporal specificity; for example, to inform planning of emergency response to hazards. Following a review of attempts to construct time-specific representations of population, we identify the importance of assembling an underlying data model at the highest resolution in each of the spatial, temporal, and attribute domains. This model can then be interrogated at any required intersection of these domains. We argue that such an approach is necessary to moderate the effects of what we term the modifiable spatiotemporal unit problem in which even detailed spatial data might be inadequate to support time-sensitive analyses. We present an initial implementation of the framework for a case study of Southampton, United Kingdom, using bespoke software (SurfaceBuilder247). We demonstrate the generation of spatial population distributions for multiple reference times using currently available data sources. The article concludes by setting out key research areas including the enhancement and validation of spatiotemporal population methods and models.
22. Economics
22-1 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH
33-3400
Innovation. Policy. Regional development. Research. Technology. Urban areas.
The term ‘science park’ evokes a “you know it when you see it” consensus among policy experts. Although the function of science parks is broadly understood as collaborative applied research between universities, industry, and governments, the physical and institutional form of these ‘cooperative research centers’ shows significant variation. In this paper I present a typology of such centers in the current US context and discuss how they are changing. Using evidence from one high-tech industry, I underscore the agglomerated nature of basic and applied science—a key argument in the rethinking of decisions around public investments in scientific spaces. Finally, I conclude that US innovation policy is shifting to a more explicitly metropolitan orientation, recognizing the importance of proximity and agglomeration. Implicit in this shift is a reevaluation of the geography of public investment in technology infrastructure as it pertains to cities and regions.
33-3401
Business improvement districts. Businesses. Contingent valuation. Income. Investment. Urban regeneration.
Urban regeneration has increasingly emphasised long-term policy objectives and public–private partnership arrangements where risk and profits are more equitably distributed between the parties. Similarly, successive governments have endorsed area-based regeneration vehicles with increasing importance placed on enterprise zones, business improvement districts (BIDs), tax incremental finance, and other local asset backed vehicles. Each regeneration vehicle necessitates a clear policy direction and performance measurement of its policy outputs to ensure that funding is targeted at initiatives delivering sustainability impacts. This paper presents a ‘market’ and ‘nonmarket’ appraisal of the financial impact of BIDs as an area-based regeneration vehicle. It utilises data from a UK-wide survey to demonstrate the potential of BIDs in generating direct income and indirect investment and how the output capacity of the BID model increases over time. The paper concludes that BIDs have significant leverage potential whilst acting as a key conduit for coordinating wider area-based regeneration.
33-3402
Asia. Consumption. Economic instability. Fiscal policy. Investment.
Fiscal stimulus programs have contributed substantially to developing Asia’s faster and stronger-than-expected recovery from the global financial crisis. This may lead to political pressures for greater use of countercyclical fiscal policy in the postcrisis period. However, the countercyclical effectiveness of fiscal policy depends critically on the extent to which it crowds out private investment and consumption. In the medium term, the use of fiscal policy to promote rebalancing toward domestic demand may require a moderate fiscal expansion. The extent of crowding out will impinge upon the effectiveness of such fiscal expansion in boosting domestic demand. In this paper we perform empirical analysis on both cross-country panel data and country-specific time-series data to investigate crowding out in the region. Overall, our empirical evidence is decidedly mixed, with no clear evidence of either crowding out or crowding in. The evidence fails to provide compelling support for greater use of fiscal policy for countercyclical purposes. In the context of rebalancing, fiscal expansion will not, in and of itself, contribute to a more balanced demand and output structure. That would require using fiscal policy to help remove structural impediments to private consumption and investment.
33-3403
Evolution. Parks. Regional characteristics. Science and technology.
This study examines how the Daedeok Science and Technology (S&T) Park, built as a national R&D center, has evolved over time from the perspective of a complex adaptive system. We argue that the Daedeok S&T Park—a planned park exhibiting path-dependent, self-reinforcing trajectories led by the government—has gradually evolved over time, undergoing some tension between nationalizing and regionalizing forces instead of encountering an imminent and radical transformation through the replication of a new model each time. The state’s role is highlighted as a creator that ironically leads to the process of the planned park’s evolution toward a more cluster-based park by strengthening regional actors’ capabilities and changing the structure of governance. The study contributes to the literature on S&T parks by providing an in-depth analysis of an S&T park from an evolutionary perspective, and not from a typical static evaluation, and is based on archival analyses and case studies of ten firms as well as on in-depth interviews with key actors.
33-3404
China. Innovation. Planning system. Science and technology.
The ‘cultivated’ nature of the Chinese science parks, against the background of a transitional economy, differentiates them from spontaneous and cooperative Western models, and is a phenomenon deserving close examination. We study the dynamics and features of the so-called Optics Valley of China (OVC) in Hubei, aiming to explore the characteristics of an embryonic local innovation system constructed in a less-favoured region. The results show that institutional factors are the leading forces in a cultivated science park like the OVC. However, along with the shifting focus of the local government, the OVC’s industrial scale has remained small and its industrial chain has remained incomplete. Moreover, the lack of trust and interactions between various components in this innovation system has been highly noticeable. All these features may be seen as warnings to the OVC that a revision of this innovation system is needed in order to avoid the fate of becoming an ‘optical illusion’.
33-3405
Business. Decision support. Public perceptions. United Kingdom.
This paper reports on a study which seeks to evaluate the role of small business rates relief as a means of government support for small businesses, in terms of both the financial benefit for recipient businesses and the symbolic significance of rates relief as a form of state support for the small business community in general. In doing so, the paper engages with the theoretical debate regarding the effectiveness and targeting of support to small businesses and how best to achieve this. The paper is based upon a survey of 391 small businesses receiving rates relief in Wales. The study contributes to the literature by filling a gap in our knowledge of business perception of the impact of rates relief and identifying some of the positive and negative aspects of such support mechanisms.
33-3406
Growth. High-tech development. Planning. Territory. United Kingdom.
The South East of England is Britain’s ‘problem region’ of unsettled administrative and political arrangements centred on a dense web of generally small settlements and their complex interrelations. Surrounding and tied to the international finance and political centres of London, much of the rest of the semirural South East region nevertheless exhibits a degree of polycentricity. Notably, within the South East of England are a series of ‘high-tech’ hot spots critical to future UK economic growth. However, the achievement of significant growth in and around high-tech spaces is challenging, given the context of semirurality and historic infrastructure shortfalls in some of these locations. Growth is therefore associated with significant planning dilemmas, a situation which has prompted the introduction of ‘soft’ planning spaces as a means to transcend sclerotic governance structures and planning policy stasis. Yet, these subregional arrangements may also represent a vehicle for the reassertion of territory, refracting and reinforcing local political conflict rather than cultivating an unambiguous form of postpolitics. We illustrate these issues with regard to the emergence of the ‘Science Vale UK’ area in southern Oxfordshire, and consider some of the broader implications of planning for growth in such a distinctive settlement pattern.
22-6 SPATIAL ANALYSIS/MODELS
33-3407
Financing. Mobility. Policy. Tax structure. Urban redevelopment.
Growing influence of the new mobilities paradigm among human geographers has combined with a long and rich disciplinary tradition of studying the movement of things and people. Yet how policy ideas and knowledge are mobilized remains a notably underdeveloped area of inquiry. In this article, we discuss the mobilization of policy ideas and policy models as a particularly powerful type of mobile knowledge. The article examines the burgeoning academic work on policy mobilities and points toward a growing policy mobilities approach in the literature, noting the multidisciplinary conversations behind the approach as well as the key commitments of many of its advocates. This approach is illustrated using the travels of tax increment financing (TIF) with the role of learning and market-making within efforts to introduce TIF in more cities highlighted. In conclusion, we discuss some of the political and practical limits that often confront efforts to mobilize policy ideas.
33-3408
Feminism. Food. Geography. Learning.
This article considers the perils and potential of an increasingly popular alternative food commodity: heritage and heirloom foods. Drawing on ethnographic research with Black Beluga lentil farmers in Montana, I develop a process-based means of conceptualizing heritage agriculture, to avoid the pitfalls of simply reifying old crop varieties. This article makes three contributions to scholarship on alternative food commodities: (1) modeling a method of generative critique of alternative food movements that are in danger of being undermined by their articulation as commodity markets, (2) demonstrating how feminist ethnography of situated knowledge production can provide insight into processes of cross-species learning through which alternative food systems are created and sustained, and (3) suggesting that a reflexive approach to alternative food movement praxis is the best means of fostering environmental sustainability and social justice.
33-3409
Business services. Deconcentration. Regions.
This paper analyses the location patterns of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in Europe in line with the most recent literature. Our main contribution is to provide new evidence about the location patterns of KIBS considering the European continent, as opposed to individual countries, as the unit of analysis. We first present the concentration and specialisation patterns of KIBS activities in Europe, including the variations that have occurred during the last few years. Second, we try to provide an explanation of KIBS regional specialisation patterns on the basis of the factors identified by the literature. The results suggest that KIBS activities are highly geographically concentrated in Europe. In this respect, capital cities, which have increasingly emerged as strongly specialized locations in services, play a central role in geography of KIBS. At the same time, there is also evidence of a tendency of sparse dispersal of KIBS throughout European regions. Overall, our results reinforce the importance of agglomeration externalities, market size, regional accessibility, regional knowledge base, and the institutional nature of the regional capital city. Finally, regarding changes in KIBS regional specialisation, we find that these are largely associated to changes in regional GDP.
33-3410
Accountability. Business improvement districts. Governance. Privatization. Stakeholders. Urban governance.
Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) were introduced in England just over ten years ago, and their adoption in over 180 locations all over the country owes a great deal to their potential ability to raise private funds to invest in the development of business areas. However, much of the academic literature on BIDs has been critical of what it sees as an expansion of corporate control of urban spaces and the weakening of elected local government, often on the evidence of a long-running North American debate. On the basis of ten case studies of English BIDs, in this paper I address the evolution of those organisations as private stakeholder-led instruments for the governance and management of business areas in England. I discuss whether and to what extent English BIDs constitute private government of urban areas, and the attendant issues of accountability and spatial inequalities in the distribution of public services and investment. I conclude by examining the implications of its findings for the future of urban governance.
33-3411
Asia. High-tech centers. High-tech industries. Technology.
Designated high-tech spaces such as science and high-technology parks have come to the fore as vehicles for promoting local and regional economic development in many nations. The evidence of their efficacy is mixed and reflects contradictions in the roles they are asked to perform in the service of national economic modernization. Indeed, in this respect and in many instances, their value may be largely political and rhetorical. Malaysia is a case in point and one we focus on in this paper, where we discuss the contribution of high-tech spaces—Kulim High-Tech Park, Technology Park Malaysia, BioXCell, and the multimedia supercorridor—to the political economy of economic modernization. Drawing on original interview material, we highlight the tangled intraterritorial and extraterritorial geographies in which these privileged high-tech spaces are positioned.
33-3412
Capitalism. Geography. Globalization. Spatial analysis.
In the spirit of strengthening its intellectual foundations and clarifying its contributions to making sense of Earth, we should resist any inclination to treat geography as a club—a discipline with boundaries to be policed and defended. I advocate for the strengths of thinking geographically, a way of being in the world open to all. This means attending to the geography of knowledge production; how spatiotemporalities shape and are shaped by socionatural processes; the emergent more-than-human world; the variety of ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies underlying knowledge claims; and the world not only as it is but also as it should be. Thinking geographically about globalizing capitalism can problematize the particular sociospatial positionalities from which commonsense understandings of capitalism have metastasized. Europe did not invent capitalist practices but became globalizing capitalism’s center of calculation, catalyzed by the spatial dynamics of colonialism elevating Europe relative to its predecessors. Thinking geographically undermines the mainstream account of globalizing capitalism emanating from Europe, that of a rising tide capable of lifting all boats and bringing prosperity to all hard-working and responsible individuals and well-governed territories. Indeed, such body- and place-based accounts obscure how asymmetric connectivities between places and interscalar dynamics, coevolving with uneven geographical development, coproduce unequal sociospatial positionality and conditions of possibility for those propagating and encountering globalizing capitalism. Capitalism also cannot be understood, or practiced, simply as an economic process; its economic aspects are co-implicated with political, cultural (gendered, raced, etc.), social, and biophysical processes, in ways that repeatedly exceed and undermine any “laws of economics.” Thinking geographically necessitates acknowledging space for alternative, more-than-capitalist experiments and trajectories, enriched by peripheral experiences of and encounters with globalizing capitalism.
22-7 ECONOMIC THEORY
33-3413
Academics. Arts. Entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs. Knowledge exchange. Universities.
The extensive literature on academic entrepreneurship has focused almost entirely on science and engineering, while little is known about the extent of it in other disciplines, most notably the creative arts. We analyse the context, motivations, and variety of academic entrepreneurship in the creative arts using a recently completed survey of UK academics, providing microdata on 1108 academics. The data are complemented using institutional data taken from the Higher Education–Business and Community Interaction Survey, and data on individual submissions to the Research Assessment Exercise 2008. We highlight four characteristics of academic environment in the creative arts that strongly influence the nature of the entrepreneurship in the field: the practice-based nature of the research; the role of networks, particularly networks linked to teaching; the importance on nonmonetary rewards; and the role of geography. Our results indicate that academic entrepreneurship in the creative arts is varied and extensive, and that it could be better supported by policy.
33-3414
Financial services. Money. Security. Terrorism.
Targeted financial sanctions regimes and regulations on ‘dirty money’ put banks on the front line in securing financial circulation. This is the context in which banking actors face the challenge of juggling with hundred of sanction, watch and regulatory lists. In light of that list mania for banking policing, list appears to have become the security device of choice in the everyday life of the financial industry across the world. Instead of reducing the complexity of security-finance dynamics to a zero-sum game (securitization of finance vs financialization of security), the article rather aims to question the critical role of lists in the cross-colonization of finance and security. Drawing on empirical research in the United Kingdom and India, the article adopts an ‘analytics of devices’ to think of and analyse banking policing practices through the instrumentation that makes these practices possible and stable over time. It argues that banking appropriation of security lists both (re)configures lists ‘social identity’ and banking actors’ power-relations in the fields of finance and security. Ultimately, the analytical focus on lists appropriation sheds new light on what securing circulation means in finance.
33-3415
Arts. Economy. Higher education. Human capital. Humanitarianism. Labor markets.
The recent change in funding structure in the UK higher education system has fuelled an animated debate about the role that arts and humanities (A&H) subjects play not only within higher education but more broadly in the society and the economy. The debate has engaged with a variety of arguments and perspectives, from the intrinsic value of A&H, to their contribution to the broader society and their economic impact, particularly in relation to the creative economy, through knowledge exchange activities. The paper argues that in the current debate very little attention has been placed on the role that A&H graduates play in the economy, through their work after graduation, and specifically in the creative economy. Using Higher Education Statistical Agency data, we analyse the performance of A&H graduates (compared with other graduates) and particularly explore how embedded they are with the creative economy and its associated industries. The results highlight a complex intersection of different subdisciplines of the A&H with the creative economy but also reveal the salary gap and unstable working conditions experienced by graduates in this field.
33-3416
Design. Living conditions. Planning. Technology.
Does a high-tech economy create fundamentally different places from other employment areas? In this paper I propose a typology of small to medium-scale high-technology districts in terms of their physical environments rather than their economic features (which is the more common basis of such classifications). I define a set of recognizable high-tech places: corridors, clumps, cores, comprehensive campuses, technology subdivisions, and scattered technology sites. I argue that there are many overlaps in design and layout with generic urban industrial and office development, and with planned new towns, university campuses, and garden suburbs. However, as this part of the economy grows, so too will the effect of such places on long-term urban sustainability and livability. It is important that planning and design for such developments consider larger effects on issues such as transportation options, energy use, housing balance, and sense of place.
33-3417
Commercial real estate. Commercial sector. Financial services. Sustainability. Values.
At the same time that the sustainability agenda has gained purchase within the commercial property market, financialisation has also been having an impact. This article argues that this impact has been concentrated in the prime sector of the market and that there is a significant non-prime sector that also deserves attention. Using a new economic sociology framework, it presents an analysis of how sustainability concerns have penetrated both the prime and non-prime commercial property sectors, looking at the construction of the object of market exchange, the modalities of valuation and the role of calculative practices based on classificatory tools. It demonstrates why promoting sustainability is occurring in the financialised prime sector and largely being ignored elsewhere. While showing the value of a new economic sociology framework, it suggests that the claims for creating a disentangled abstract object of exchange are exaggerated where commercial property is concerned.
33-3418
Fiscal externalities. Human capital. Industrial agglomerations.
This paper examines the geography of talented people using educational and occupational measures and its relationship with creative industries in French local labour systems. The link between talent and the creative economy has recently generated interest in the economic development literature as well as among policy makers. Previous studies have shown that spatial concentration of talented people in an area may bring about externalities generated by the exchange of new ideas between individuals, and this may foster the clustering of activities. Correlation and regression analyses suggest that creative industrial concentration is associated with talent as well as with tolerance and technology measures. This paper offers the empirical basis for the design of policies related to talent concentration in France. This type of policy may boost the capacity of territories for creativity and innovation, in line with the objectives set out by the European Commission.
33-3419
Academics. Entrepreneurs. Regional innovation. United Kingdom. Universities.
In this paper we explore the spin-off process from London’s universities using a regional innovation systems (RIS) framework. We examine the pattern of spin-offs in the context of changes in institutional support systems, both within the universities and in the London region. The majority of the university-related spin-offs are small and medium-sized enterprises concentrated in biomedical sectors, as elsewhere. However, over a third have left London. We explore these patterns, the implications for understanding the role of universities in RIS, and consequent policy implications.
33-3420
Cooperative planning. Government. Industrialization. Nationalism.
This paper examines the impact of state intervention in French–German interfirm linkages and discusses the implications of conflicting national interests for the furthering of single market integration. It demonstrates that, despite initial success in launching large-scale cross-border alliances in strategic sectors, France and Germany have remained divided by their own industrial nationalism. It argues that their respective attitudes towards industrial policy are less contradictory than would appear at first sight, but that transcending industrial nationalism by Europeanising the notion of economic patriotism would be an essential precondition for a more efficient EU-wide industrial policy within a better integrated internal market.
PHYSICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL
31. Energy
31-1 ENERGY POLICY
33-3421
China. Collaboration. Collaborative planning. Energy planning. Governance. Technological innovation.
This paper examines relationships between collaborative governance and technological innovation. Collaborative governance is a key strategy for this form of innovation but remains underresearched. This paper explores how and to what extent collaborative governance can contribute to technological innovation by means of a case study of wind energy in China. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three provinces—Xinjiang, Shanghai, and Guangdong—the paper presents three major findings. Firstly, the three provinces reflect local variations in their models of government–industry–university collaboration. Xinjiang illustrates a hierarchical model, Shanghai’s model is highly institutionalised, whereas Guangdong has adopted a market model. Secondly, the mechanisms for collaborative governance are conceptualised into three integral elements: resources (such as funds, personnel, and technological knowledge), structures (such as collaborative institutions and learning networks), and processes (such as resource pooling and learning). Thirdly, the Chinese model of collaborative governance for technological innovation shares some important characteristics with Western models but also exhibits some differences: the relatively limited role of public service organisations, a domestic market dominated by state-owned enterprises, the relatively inactive role of industrial associations, and an emergence of policy networks distinguish the Chinese models.
32. Environment
32-1 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
33-3422
Behavior. Change. Choice model. Environmental policy. Mobility. Social practices. Sustainability.
This paper explores some of the limitations of individualistic approaches towards the study and promotion of environmentally sustainable practices within the context of efforts by states to tackle global climate change. Using the example of government attempts to promote sustainable mobility through behavioural shifts amongst citizens in the UK, the paper argues that an overreliance on individualistic approaches poses three major challenges through the ways in which: (1) mobility is intricately entwined with social practices and consumption settings; (2) practices of (un)sustainable mobility are related to the structure and organisation of physical environments; and (3) solutions for sustainable mobility are framed through narrow political lenses that fail to address the potential social transformations needed to tackle climate change. Accordingly, the paper argues that both researchers and policy makers need to revisit the assumptions made concerning the role of individuals and their relationship to underlying sociostructural and political challenges for reducing carbon emissions from transport.
33-3423
Economic framing. Environmental governance. Governance. Policy. Political legitimacy. Water.
The discursive framing of projects is an oft-used strategy to claim legitimacy and create support for proposed measures. By giving a project an appealing ‘label’, politicians and policy makers try to prevent criticism. However, policy labels are thrown out like ‘boomerangs’ with a view to gaining leverage, resources, and legitimacy. The thrower, however, cannot control how the boomerang comes back. This paper sheds light on the consequences of these ‘backfiring labels’ with the help of two illustrative case studies: a ‘calamity polder’ for controlled flood storage (Ooijpolder) and a ‘bypass’ for the river IJssel near Kampen, respectively. Interestingly, the wider frames from which these labels originate differ and give rise to different dynamics, but with the same outcome: the label reaped the opposite effect. We analyze the way in which this process of strategic ‘labelling’ takes place, its discursive power, its impact on the governance process in question, and how policy makers react upon backfiring consequences.
33-3424
Climate change. Emergency planning. Nature. Politics. Risk. Security. Urbanism.
Climate change is a powerful reminder of the interdependencies of the human–nature relationship and the fallacy of the modernist assumption about our ability to tame nature for our exploitation with little or no consequences. However, it is argued that such reflexivity is being subverted by the dominant discourses of climate change which portray: nature as risk, our relation to it in terms of security, and the quest for urban resilience as emergency planning. By construing nature as a threat to rather than an asset for cities, they signify a departure from sustainability discourses. They represent a hark back to a premodern conception of human–nature relations that was centred on what nature does to us rather than what we do to nature. Seeing nature as risk ushers in deep concerns with security. The ‘risk society’ becomes entwined with the security society. This paper examines the political implications of this discursive shift and argues that, as securitisation becomes the hegemonic discourse of our time, the postpolitics of hope, which underpinned sustainability, is giving way to the postpolitics of fear which underlies climate change.
33-3425
Adaptation. Climate change. Complexity theory. Local government. Organization. Policy analysis.
Complex policy issues such as climate change adaptation can be interpreted in many different ways, resulting in different assumptions about their purpose and goals. Using material from a qualitative study in the Australian local government sector, this research shows that stakeholders involved in local adaptation policy formulation often do not have a shared view about the meaning and purposes of adaptation, although such shared understanding is commonly assumed in adaptation processes. Drawing on the frame-research literature and current conceptualisations of climate change adaptation, we argue that subconscious frame divergence can present a major challenge for effective organisational-level adaptation. Conversely, making frames and framing processes explicit is a first step towards clarifying adaptation goals and generating shared ownership of adaptation processes. While frames have been shown to be intrinsically subjective, we discuss three dominant frames that emerged from the study: avoiding disasters, community resilience, and averting organisational risk. We evaluate these in light of their theoretical origin and recent application towards climate change adaptation. Our research suggest that the ‘averting organisational risks’ frame is by far the most commonly activated frame. Individuals working in the community services sector frequently referred to the ‘community resilience’ frame, while the ‘avoiding disasters frame’ was used in public and policy discourse to circumvent the arguments of those sceptical about the existence and causes of climate change. We suggest that, by incorporating frame reflexivity into existing adaptation planning processes, a more diverse range of policy options can be explored, delivering more effective adaptation policies.
33-3426
Environment. Public participation. Sustainability. Universities.
In this paper I set the emergence of ‘coinquiry’ approaches to public engagement in the context of the apparent inability of conventional arrangements to contribute effectively to the transition to environmental sustainability. I explicate characteristics of coinquiry, which is distinguished from ‘upstream engagement’, in so doing developing criteria with which to evaluate its application. Examining documentary sources, I identify and critically review projects funded by the UK Beacons for Public Engagement on the topic of environment and sustainability. The conclusion highlights the factors limiting the capacity of the Beacon initiative—and possibly that of similar national initiatives to be undertaken in the future—to attain stated objectives relating to public engagement with environment and sustainability matters and the practice of coinquiry.
33-3427
Adaptation strategies. Climate change. Climate policy. Emissions trading. Problem solving. Science and technology. Uncertainty.
Policy makers have had great difficulty in understanding and responding effectively to complex or ‘wicked’ problems. Contentious policy initiatives are hard to implement when knowledge bases are divergent and incomplete, when short-term interests conflict with long-term benefits, and when problems are construed or framed in very different ways. These features of wicked problems have been central in Australian debates about initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to address the likely impacts of climate change. Given the closely interconnected nature of social, technical, legal–political, economic, and natural-resource issues, the political challenges of managing adaptive change are numerous. A strategic adaptation framework is necessary to complement ongoing mitigation efforts directed at greenhouse gas reduction. Strategic innovation requires pluralistic and adaptive processes, such as multistakeholder forums, consideration of scenario analyses, and the use of boundary organizations. In light of the highly contested nature of the issues, the multiple bases of knowledge and interests, and the provisional nature of adaptation choices, there are major policy governance challenges facing the Australian government and stakeholders in grappling with climate adaptation.
33-3428
Environmental policy. Policy. United Kingdom.
This paper examines the emergence of libertarian paternalism or ‘nudge’ as a rationale of government in the UK and charts the way in which this development has been enabled by, and has enabled, a process of policy translation. We examine: the reasons for the emergence of libertarian paternalism in the UK; the processes that have enabled libertarian paternalism to become a significant way of framing policy in the UK for both the New Labour and the Coalition administrations; the way in which this set of policy initiatives has been predicated upon a process of social and spatial embedding that has seen it become interpreted as a meaningful and default solution to a whole host of social ills. We conclude by arguing that there is a need to appreciate both the political malleability of libertarian paternalism as a concept and the complex geographies that have enabled it to assume political significance in the UK.
33-3429
Ecosystem. Governance. Knowledge. Sustainable development.
The concept of ecosystem services is increasingly being promoted by academics and policy makers as a means to protect ecological systems through more informed decision making. A basic premise of this approach is that strengthening the ecological knowledge base will significantly enhance ecosystem health through more sensitive decision making. However, the existing literature on knowledge utilisation, and many previous attempts to improve decision making through better knowledge integration, suggest that producing ‘more knowledge’ is only ever a necessary but insufficient condition for greater policy success. We begin this paper by reviewing what is already known about the relationship between ecological knowledge development and utilisation, before introducing a set of theme issue papers that examine—for the very first time—how this politically and scientifically salient relationship plays out across a number of vital policy venues such as land-use planning, policy-level impact assessment, and cost–benefit analysis. Following a detailed synthesis of the key findings of all the papers, this paper identifies and explores new research and policy challenges in this important and dynamic area of environmental governance.
33-3430
Critical analysis. Gender. Implementation. Innovation. Multivariate analysis. Policy.
What happens when a gender requirement is introduced into a Norwegian innovation policy programme? We apply a critical theoretical and methodological approach using the concept of articulation to analyse how meanings of gender are constructed, and how power struggles are part of it. Taking a multilevel approach and using multiple data sources, we examine articulations at the national, regional, and project levels. We find that gender articulations are in line with hegemonic conceptualisations of gender as a variable and as a nonissue to innovation but also detect attempts to challenge the dominant understanding of gender. Demands ‘from above’ have an effect at all levels as the threat of negative reactions encourages a certain self-disciplining, but the demands do not ensure an integration of a gender perspective in the policy programme. We suggest that, when seeking to integrate gender perspectives in policy programmes, the rationale needs to be clear and understood at all programme levels.
33-3431
Australia. Climate change. Climate policy. Local government. Social justice.
Climate change is a highly contested policy issue in Australia, generating fierce debate at every level of governance. In this paper we explore a crucial tension in both the policy and the public debate: a seeming lack of attention to social inclusion and broader equity implications. We pay special attention to the municipal scale, where concerns about social difference and democratic participation are often foregrounded in political discourse, using South East Queensland—a recognised climate change ‘hotspot’—as a case study. Mobilising critical discourse analysis techniques, we interrogate three local government climate change response strategies, and place these in the context of ransscalar discourse networks which appear to sustain a technocratic, ‘ecological modernisation’ approach to the issue. Finally, we suggest a broad strategy for reimagining this approach to embed a notion of climate justice in our policy thinking about climate change.
33-3432
Australia. Carbon dioxide. Geographical analysis. Planning techniques. Urban governance.
In the political geography of responses to climate change, and the governance of carbon more specifically, the urban has emerged as a strategic site. Although it is recognized that urban carbon governance occurs through diverse programs and projects—involving multiple actors and working through multiple sites, mechanisms, objects, and subjects—surprisingly little attention has been paid to the actual processes through which these diverse elements are drawn together and held together in the exercise of governing. These processes—termed configuration—remain underspecified. This article explores urban carbon governance interventions as relational configurations, excavating how their diverse elements—human, institutional, representational, and material—are assembled, drawn into relation, and held together in the exercise of governing. Through an analysis of two contrasting case studies of urban carbon governance interventions in Sydney, Australia, we draw out common processes of configuring and specific sets of devices and techniques that gather, align, and maintain the relations between actors and elements that constitute intervention projects. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of conceiving of governing projects as relational configurations for how we understand the nature and practice of urban carbon governance, especially by revealing the diverse modes of power at work within processes of configuring.
33-3433
Informal sector. Policy process. Sustainability. Urban areas. Water.
This paper explores the complex interactions that occur as formal policies are interpreted and utilised to develop water management plans in peri-urban Delhi. With an emphasis on people’s participation in decision making, the paper examines some of the disjunctures between formal assumptions about water management in peri-urban areas and practices on the ground. In doing so it attempts to reveal some of the key processes responsible for social fragmentation of services. The paper describes informal coping strategies adopted by poor and marginalised peri-urban communities with little or no access to formal provision. Within this, the role of ‘hidden’ interactions with the formal system are highlighted in the context of failures of formal participatory platforms. The paper argues that enhanced understanding of the policy process, and the alternative arrangements that emerge in response to its shortfalls, could be important contributory factors in identifying realistic intervention strategies for enhanced, more socially just, water management in peri-urban situations.
32-2 ENVIRONMENTAL MODELING
33-3434
Air pollution. Ecology. Electricity. Energy conservation. Nature. Planning and society.
In 2010, the largest hydropower dam ever constructed in Laos, the Nam Theun 2 (NT2) Power Project, was completed with crucial—indeed, deal-making—support from the World Bank. Although the vast majority of the electricity produced by the project is exported to neighboring Thailand, the most important negative social and environmental impacts have occurred in Laos. While much attention has focused on the dam reservoir, there have been significant effects downstream from the project along the Xe Bang Fai (XBF) River, a major tributary of the mainstream Mekong River. In this article we examine the complex relationships between energy produced by NT2 and energy consumption patterns in Thailand. We link varying electricity demand in Thai air conditioning, fluctuating water releases from the NT2 dam, and downstream changes in XBF hydrology. Taking a political ecology approach, we emphasize how NT2 is part of rescaling electricity production and consumption networks, changes to their modes of ordering, and the reworking of nature–society relations. Although NT2 involves a complex array of social and environmental civil society concerns for Thailand, Laos, and global society, this was largely obscured by the commercial and technical orientation of its novel governance systems.
33-3435
Geography. Narrative analysis. Science and technology.
From its inception as an object of study, salt marshes were conceived as a form of continual accumulation. For more than a century this paradigm structured the understanding of tidal marshes in Canada’s St. Lawrence estuary and was used by physical and human geographers, biologists, agronomists, and ecologists to encourage marsh reclamation as a form of collaboration with nature. In the 1980s, this school of thought abruptly gave way to a school of generalized erosion. This new paradigm, resulting from the scientific and social reaction to the Anthropocene and the advent of applied research in risk management, underlies a crisis narrative used to promote intervention by concerned actors to protect marshes and human infrastructure. Although the changing socioeconomy of salt marshes is well known, the evolution of scientific thinking about them continues to be depicted in positivist terms. Critical reflection on salt marshes as a social construction of nature, however, demonstrates a clear chain of links between cultural values, scientific practices, and research outcomes. Lack of recognition of this subject–object problem impedes the current investigation of salt marsh dynamics as a function of both erosion and growth processes.
33-3436
Climate. Climate change. Watersheds.
A gridded model was developed to simulate the hydrology of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, the largest estuary in the United States. CMIP3 and CMIP5 climate projections were used to drive the model to assess changes in streamflow and watershed-wide hydrology. Index of agreement values indicated good model performance. Annual average temperature is projected to increase 1.9°C to 5.4°C by 2080 to 2099, with the greatest warming occurring in summer and fall in the northern part of the watershed. Annual total precipitation is projected to increase between 5.2 percent and 15.2 percent by 2080 to 2099, with the largest increases generally occurring in winter. Average evapotranspiration and rainfall are projected to increase while snowfall, snow water storage, and snowmelt decrease. Subsurface moisture is projected to decrease during the warmer months and the time to recharge increases and, in some cases, never actually occurs. Changes in annual runoff for all 346 climate projections averaged 0 percent (2020–2039), –1.5 percent (2050–2069), and –5.1 percent (2080–2099). There is a 48 percent, 52 percent, and 60 percent chance, respectively, for the future time periods that annual runoff will be less than baseline values (1950–1999). Extreme runoff projections are overwhelmingly associated with the negative end of the distribution. Runoff increases are confined to January through March and to higher elevations. This study is novel in its use of a large number of climate models, the gridded nature of the hydrologic model, and the simulation of several hydrologic variables, all of which allowed for the assessment of both uncertainty in the projections and variation across multiple spatial and temporal scales.
33-3437
Local networks. Population. Stream restoration. Urban landscape. Urbanization.
The Rouge River watershed, a highly urbanized watershed in southeast Michigan, has substantial impervious surface coverage, relatively high population density, and modified stream network (e.g., stream straightening and burial, dams, and underground retention). The number of stream channels and order decreases, increasing flooding, reducing water quality, and decreasing aquatic species. This study defines, identifies, and describes the progression of the geographic pattern of urban stream deserts—defined as those areas within a watershed that exhibit no surface stream channels due to the effects of human development and population growth. Urban stream deserts are identified and characterized using three data sets: (1) historical aerial imagery, (2) historical census boundary and tables, and (3) stream network data. Flowlines digitized off aerial photos from 1949 are compared against 2013 flowlines to identify areas of the watershed now devoid of stream channels. In the Rouge River watershed, stream density has decreased since 1949, which coincides with a rapid population increase and systematic burial of urban streams. Urban stream deserts in the Rouge River watershed constitute 23 percent of the watershed area, but these areas included as much as 66 percent of the watershed population in 1950 (as the urban stream deserts were developing) and dropped to 41 percent in 2010. This conceptual model of urban stream deserts is applicable to many urban and industrialized areas that have replaced stream channels with infrastructure during periods of economic growth, only to experience depopulation, aging infrastructure, and, as a result, degraded, modified, or altogether buried stream networks.
32-3 ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING
33-3438
Democracy. Governance. Management. Planning. Representation. Rivers.
The relationship between governance and representation is examined using the development of river basin management plans (RBMPs) in Scotland as a case study. We used a longitudinal ethnographic approach to explore the (1) remit and rationale for representation choices; (2) representative characteristics and claims; and (3) influence of nonparticipating interests on representatives. The invite-only ‘advisory group’ members represent a network of state, private, and third-sector interests. The members make claims to represent others on the basis of authority, accountability, shared identity, and epistemic values. These claims are made for specific although often multiple and overlapping constituencies. These representation claims suggest that representative, rather than traditional, legitimacy is being defended. However, members were also concerned about how the RBMP advisory groups coexisted with traditional and direct democratic processes. The results need to be considered within the overall system of environmental governance within Scotland, the UK, and Europe. The findings are relevant to multiple fields of environmental management, including protected area management and coastal management.
33-3439
Climate change. Economics. Sustainability.
This paper highlights planning interventions in countries that have implemented successful greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction policies while continuing to increase per capita GDP. Screening and reviewing all countries in the world, with this research I have identified nine countries that have steadily decoupled per capita carbon emissions from GDP. GHG emission profiles and pertinent policies from national case studies demonstrate the built environment sectors most responsive (waste, residential, land-use change, and forestry) and least responsive (transportation) to GHG reduction policies without import substitution. A comparison amongst case-study countries and theoretical models indicates the best opportunities for targeting GHG reductions.
33-3440
Assessment. Ecosystem. Environment. Knowledge. Planning.
Proponents of ecosystem services approaches to assessment claim that it will ensure the environment is ‘properly valued’ in decision making. Analysts seeking to understand the likelihood of this could usefully reexamine previous attempts to deploy novel assessment processes in land-use planning and how they affect decisions. This paper draws insights from a meta-analysis of three case studies: environmental capital, ecological footprinting, and green infrastructure. Concepts from science and technology studies are used to interpret how credibility for each new assessment process was assembled, and the ways by which the status of knowledge produced becomes negotiable or prescriptive. The influence of these processes on planning decisions is shown to be uneven, and depends on a combination of institutional setting and problem framing, not simply knowledge content. The analysis shows how actively cultivating wide stakeholder buy-in to new assessment approaches may secure wider support, but not necessarily translate into major influence on decisions.
33-3441
Colonialism. Critical pedagogy. Environmental assessment. Indigenous organizations. Indigenous people. Settlement.
This article is about how fish are regulated through environmental assessment. The theoretical frame used is nested between critical Indigenous studies and posthumanism which allows for an interrogation of how fish are very formally produced as disposable through mining regulatory procedures, such as environmental impact statements, that form the basis of the environmental assessment processes in Canada. The site of analysis is Fish Lake on Tsilhqot’in lands in the interior of British Columbia. I look at the corporate-scientific foundation of Canadian federal environmental assessment and an amendment within the federal Fisheries Act that allows fish bearing lakes to be turned into mining waste areas. An analysis of the use of these regulations illuminates part of the story about a twice-rejected copper–gold mine proposal at Fish Lake. In light of how Canadian regulations can produce fish as disposable, I explore if the value of fish can be explained externally from capital accumulation and technical representations in scientific studies within environmental assessment. The article reveals the environmental assessment process largely negates what I refer to as ‘‘fish-hood.’’
33-3442
Collaborative planning. Institutions. Network analysis. Regional government. Water management.
Regional collaborative institutions are seen as tools for improving collaboration and for reducing the inefficiency of fragmented management and planning. However, recent research has shown that the ability of new regional institutions to achieve these aims is contingent upon their relationship to the existing institutional landscape. This paper uses network analyses of six newly created Integrated Regional Water Management (IRWM) subregions in southern California to examine how their introduction intersects existing water management systems and whether the patterns of interaction in water planning have changed as a result. The results further our understanding of collaborative governance and regionalism by showing that the ability of regional institutions to facilitate new interactions can vary widely across a given institutional landscape. Further, while IRWM has helped to strengthen the water management network in southern California, it has not replaced existing watershed planning efforts. Interviews with water managers reveal there is support for IRWM but it is still too early to evaluate its effectiveness. Further research should explore the drivers and consequences of heterogeneity in IRWM and whether the incentives for participation are sufficient.
33-3443
Agricultural sector. Agriculture. Displacement. Land use. Land use changes. South America.
From 2000 to 2005, high returns from soybeans set off an unprecedented expansion of agricultural production across Brazil. The expansion occurred concurrently with a sharp rise in deforestation, leading academics and policymakers to question the extent and means by which the growing agricultural sector was driving regional forest loss. In this article, I consider and question the underlying drivers of indirect land use change, namely the potential impact of soybean expansion on beef prices and of land use displacement, via migration. I then present field-level results documenting the displacement process in Mato Grosso and Pará States of the Amazon. These results question the extent to which tropical Amazon deforestation is attributable to land use displacement; however, I argue that the agricultural sector could drive deforestation through other channels, namely through regional land markets.
33-3444
Development. South America. Urban growth.
Developing the Amazon into a major provider of internationally traded mineral and food commodities has dramatically transformed broad expanses of tropical forests to farm and pasturelands and to mining sites. The environmental impacts of this transformation, as well as the drivers underlying the process, have already been well documented. In this article we turn our analytical lenses to another, less examined effect of Amazon land use and environmental change, namely, the creation and development of new urban areas. Here we argue that urban growth in the Amazon is a direct residual of international interest in the production of traded commodities and of the capacity of local urban residents to capture capital and value before it is extracted from the region. Specifically, we suggest that urban growth is occurring fastest where cities have access to both rural export commodities and export corridors. We also show correlations between urban growth and lower rural population density and cities’ capacities to draw migrants from beyond their immediate rural surroundings. More broadly, we argue that urbanization in the Amazon is better interpreted as a symptom rather than a driver of the region’s land use and land cover change.
33-3445
Adaptation. Climate change. Governance. Planning. Sustainable development.
The gales of climate change blow the future open and closed. In response, we are having to learn to live with a renewed notion of limits and a novel level of uncertainty. One emerging governance response is a turn to scenario planning, which generates narratives about multiple futures refracted out from the present. Like climate change itself, scenario planning, and the broader field of futures studies it is part of, is historically and socially positioned, belying its application as a mere method or tool. This paper discusses the growing turn to scenario planning within government climate change adaptation initiatives in light of parallel shifts in governance (eg, interest in efficiency and wicked problems) and adaptation efforts (eg, framed as risk management or resilience) and their shared roots in the ambiguities of sustainable development. It provides an extended introduction to a theme issue that provides, overall, a nested discussion of the role of scenario planning by government for climate change adaptation, noting how governance, climate change adaptation, and scenario planning all fold together the motifs of openness and closedness. This paper engages with the emerging field of future geographies and critical interest in future orientations to highlight the way society’s growing engagement on climate change adaptation exposes, critiques, replicates, and amplifies our existing orientations to the future and time and their politically contested and embedded character. It points to the way the motif of open futures can be both progressive and conservative, as political and economic interests seek to open up some futures while closing down others in the name of the ambivalent goals of adaptation and sustainable development.
33-3446
Adaptation. Climate change. Institutions. Planning. Public sector.
Adapting to climate change is a new responsibility for state and local government. Yet there is little clarity about what is involved, beyond an expectation of acting in a rational, informed manner. This paper presents a study from Victoria, Australia into public servants’ perceptions and experiences of using scenario techniques for adaptation. It suggests that while scenario development is often positive for those involved, utilizing scenarios to directly ‘inform’ adaptation decision making is more difficult. It seems that scenarios are a valuable but awkward form of evidence in the contemporary environment of evidence-based adaptation, introducing new substantive knowledge in an unfamiliar form, easily dismissed on credibility, legitimacy, and salience grounds. While scenario thinking is a good fit with climate change adaptation, it clashes with the predictive paradigm underlying the evidence-based decision-making model. This suggests that, for adaptation to better fit the institutional environment, alterations to the latter are needed.
33-3447
Climate change. Institutional theory. Political legitimacy.
Climate change (CC) is a new and, up to 2013, voluntary planning area in Denmark, and it is perceived as an interdisciplinary field affecting several professions. CC is integrated into bureaucratised municipal organisations characterised by a fragmented organisational structure and strong institutional traditions and perceptions. With this paper I examine different approaches to CC governance and the institutional dynamics that occur in the integration process within eight Danish municipalities in the initial phase of integrating CC. The results show three different governance approaches related to CC planning: experimental, negotiation, and standardisation. This paper contributes insights into the intrainstitutional dynamics at the local level when climate plans are to be implemented in practice, and it adds perspectives on the role of local established networks rather than international networks for less affluent municipalities to act on CC.
33-3448
Adaptation. Climate change. European Union. Governance. Institutions. Transnational corporations. Transnationalism.
In this paper we ponder this question: what types of institutional principles would help to establish a macroregional climate change adaptation strategy in the Baltic Sea Region? Inspired by a new institutionalism approach, we trace some of the important elements of regulatory and normative institutional functions. We then discuss how top-down and bottom-up government and governance can contribute to a macroregional climate change adaptation strategy, and profile the local, national, and transnational development efforts that are already underway to facilitate coordination and learning about climate change adaptation in the Baltic Sea Region. Finally, we look at the specific role that a macroregional climate change adaptation strategy has in helping to manage institutional complexity inherent in a multilevel governance context.
32-4 RISK MANAGEMENT/IMPACT ASSESSMENT
33-3449
Land. Remote sensing. Soil.
Aeolian soil erosion is responsible for erosional landforms, or deflation patches, that are ubiquitous in the Kangerlussuaq region of West Greenland. Deflation patches are identifiable as bare regions within a mosaic of shrub and graminoid tundra, and have the potential to alter regional carbon cycling and vegetation dynamics. Understanding the spatial distribution of deflation patches is an important first step in establishing the drivers, controls, and ecological impacts of wind erosion in the region. Using high-resolution WorldView-2 satellite imagery, we created a land cover classification and percentage vegetation cover map to investigate the regional distribution and variability of deflation patches. Across the study area, deflation patches account for 22 percent of the terrestrial land surface and occur in greater density closer to the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). Farther away from the GrIS, local topography plays a larger role in determining the distribution of deflation patches, with wind erosion tending to occur on steep south–southeast-facing slopes. Parallels between the distribution of deflation patches and local wind patterns suggest that katabatic winds are an important driver behind deflation patch occurrence. Within deflation patches, graminoid cover increases with distance from the GrIS, due either to a lesser degree of erosion or to a longer recovery time. In the context of recent circumpolar shrub expansion, deflation might locally limit the dominance of shrubs by creating habitat more suitable for graminoids and is an important factor to consider when predicting vegetation changes in West Greenland.
32-5 ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY/POLLUTION
33-3450
Air pollution. Environmental justice. Ethnicity. Health inequalities. Race.
Environmental justice (EJ) research has relied on ecological analyses of coarse-scale areal units to determine whether particular populations are disproportionately burdened by toxic risks. This article advances quantitative EJ research by (1) examining whether statistical associations found for geographic units translate to relationships at the household level; (2) testing competing explanations for distributional injustices never before investigated; (3) examining adverse health implications of hazardous air pollutant (HAP) exposures; and (4) applying an underutilized statistical technique appropriate for geographically clustered data. Our study makes these advances by using generalized estimating equations to examine distributive environmental inequities in the Greater Houston (Texas) metropolitan area, based on primary household-level survey data and census block–level cancer risk estimates of HAP exposure from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In addition to main statistical effects, interaction effects are modeled to examine whether minority racial or ethnic status modifies the effects of other variables on HAP cancer risk. In terms of main effects, Hispanic and black status as well as the desire to live close to public transit exhibit robust associations with HAP cancer risk. Interaction results reveal that homeownership and homophily (i.e., the desire to live among people culturally similar to oneself) are associated with higher HAP cancer risk among Hispanics and blacks but with lower risk among whites. Disproportionate risks experienced by Hispanics and blacks are attributable neither to dampened risk perceptions nor the desire to live close to work. These findings have implications for EJ research and practice in Greater Houston and elsewhere.
33-3451
Activity. Dynamic planning. Globalization. Simulation. Time.
Spatiotemporal variability of air pollutant concentrations and individuals’ mobility are likely to play an important role in health outcomes and, therefore, time–activity-based exposure assessments are likely to be more sensitive compared to static residence-based air pollution estimates. Applied research on the effects of the variability underlying air pollutant concentrations and individuals’ mobility on personal exposure estimates remain limited, however. We demonstrate how consideration of individuals’ mobility and the spatiotemporal variability of ambient air pollution affect personal exposure estimates using both real-world data and simulated environmental conditions. Our findings suggest that time–activity-based exposure estimates might be quite similar to static estimates if spatiotemporal patterns of air pollution concentration surfaces lack autocorrelation or if an individual has a low level of mobility. There can be substantial differences, though, between two approaches when the air pollution concentrations are characterized by a model of air pollution that shows low variation over time and space and individuals’ time spent away from home is substantial.
32-6 CATASTROPHES/DISASTERS/EMERGENCIES
33-3452
Australia. Land use. Planning agency. Scales. Wildfires.
Around the world, debates over how to manage and adapt to bushfires (or wildfires) are increasingly prominent as more and different people, many of whom have little or no experience with landscape fire or land management, inhabit fire-prone environments. But bushfire events represent only the most visible aspect of complex entanglements which operate across huge temporal and spatial scales and over which humans have very limited control. In this article, we focus on how Australian landholders of settler or migrant heritage understand scalar complexities and agency and control within human/landscape fire entanglements. In view of the fact that the learning styles of landholders new to rural areas have been developed in different environments with very different challenges, we also ask whether immersion within rural, fire-prone environments influences ways of ‘knowing’ land and fire.
33-3453
Coastal environment. Disaster. Infrastructure. Public facilities. Socioeconomics. Urban areas. Vulnerability.
Coastal urban cities frequently face multiple hazards, including potentially disastrous extreme events. To combat this, vulnerability assessment is essential to developing an effective mitigation strategy. This study proposes a framework to assess the vulnerability of any densely populated urban area to disasters by considering both the population and the assets that are at risk. A set of indicators is also proposed to assess the vulnerability of social and socioeconomic systems, infrastructure, critical facilities, and adaptive capacity. The components of vulnerability were evaluated individually, using an accessible open source geographic information system at a fine 1-km grid scale, providing an insight into the spatial variability of the vulnerability. The optimal weight for individual indicators was assigned using data envelopment analysis to minimize subjective judgment and establish confidence in the results obtained. To decorrelate and reduce the dimensionality of the multivariate data, principal component analysis was performed. The proposed methodology was demonstrated on the twenty-four wards of Mumbai under the jurisdiction of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai and showed the mideastern part of Mumbai as the most vulnerable—mainly due to the increase in population and the marginal workers’ ratio. A reduction in social vulnerability has been observed, however, across the city through improvement in the literacy rate and the main workers’ ratio.
33-3454
Biodiversity. Indigenous people. Wildfires.
Wildfire plays an important role in ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest, but past relationships among fire, climate, and human actions remain unclear. A multiscale analysis of thirty-four macroscopic charcoal records from a variety of biophysical settings was conducted to reconstruct fire activity for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) during the past 12,000 years. Trends in biomass burning and fire frequency are compared to paleoenvironmental and population data at a variety of temporal and spatial scales to better understand fire regime variability on centennial- to millennial-length time scales. PNW fire activity in the early Holocene is linked to climatic and vegetation changes; however, increased fire activity in the middle to late Holocene is inconsistent with long-term trends in temperature and precipitation. Two hypotheses are explored to explain the rise in fire activity after ca. 5,500 calendar years before present, including greater climate variability and increased human use of fire. Climatic changes such as increased El Niño/Southern Oscillation event frequency during the past approximately 6,000 years could have led to hydrologic shifts conducive to more frequent fire events, despite overall trends toward cooler and moister conditions. Alternatively, increasing human populations and their associated uses of fire might have increased biomass burning. Centennial-scale changes in fire activity, such as during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age, closely match widespread shifts in both climate and population, suggesting that one or both influenced the late-Holocene fire history of the PNW.
32-7 SUSTAINABILITY
33-3455
Africa. Conservation. Media. National parks. Protected areas.
The idea of protected areas as fortress conservation has long been debated and heavily criticized. In practice, however, the paradigm is alive and well and has, in some cases and especially due to rapid increases in poaching, seen major reinforcements. This article contributes to discussions that aim to reassess fortress conservation ideas and practices by analyzing how new online media are changing the politics of access to and control over increasingly militarized protected areas. Focusing on South Africa’s Kruger National Park, one of the most iconic and mediated conservation areas globally, this article argues that new media such as online groups, webcams, and mobile phone apps encourage a new politics of social distinction in relation to the park and what it represents. These politics of distinction lead to complex new ways in which the boundaries of “fortress Kruger” are rendered (more) permeable and (more) restrictive at the same time. The article concludes that it is precisely through rendering park boundaries more permeable that new media technologies could help to reinforce the racialized and unequal hierarchies of the social order that fortress conservation was built on.
33-3456
Biological analysis. Conservation. Species diversity. Wildlife preservation.
This article takes the case of Scottish wildcats, threatened with extinction through hybridization with feral domestic cats, as a site for exploring what it means to conserve a species as such. To this end, the article looks at the practices associated with conserving Scottish wildcats as defined by a definite phenotypical, morphological and/or genetic type, abstracted from indefinite, fleshy organisms emplaced and entangled within changing ecologies. The article describes the biopolitical work of taxonomically distinguishing wildcats (Felis silvestris) from domestic cats (Felis catus) and their hybrids, exploring the challenges presented to this work by the disorderly agencies of wildliving cats. It then outlines and reflects on the proposed captive breeding programme aimed at preserving the ‘pure’ Scottish wildcat sub-species type. This case highlights the ways in which species-based conservation can conflict with care for individual animals as well as with life’s immanent, generative tendencies.
33-3457
Architectural ecology. Comfort. Ecological planning. House design. Sustainability.
Living sustainably involves a broad spectrum of practices, from relying on a technological fix to a deep green vision. The latter is often articulated by advocates and critics alike as involving shifting to a simpler lifestyle that dispenses with some of the (perceived) frivolous or environmentally damaging attachments to luxury or convenience. This article explores practices of reconceiving comfort in the context of the social and material architectures of eco-housing. Comfort is defined as an ongoing process, a negotiation between different elements (e.g., climate, materials and bodies) in a particular place. This article uses three case studies of self-built eco-communities in Britain (Green Hills, Landmatters, and Tinkers Bubble) and analyzes their bathrooms and bathing practices. In the eco-communities’ bathing practices, comfort was reconceived as not being reliant on particular facilities, furniture, or temperature, as not private but as collective and shared, and as an embodied relation. This article demonstrates the relationality of comfort, how it is therefore possible to reconceive comfort, and how comfort can be understood as a practice. This focus on practices also challenges social practice theories to more purposefully engage with those already living a highly ecological lifestyle to understand how radical change is navigated.
33. Physical Elements of Planning
33-3 PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
33-3458
Cities. Climate change. Comfort. United States. Well-being.
We examined the spatial distribution of monthly, seasonal, and annual changes in comfortable weather hours (CWHs) between 1950 and 2011 and explored the relationship between human wellness and the amount and timing of CWHs. Using a thermohygrometric index based on air temperature and dewpoint temperature recorded every three hours from thirty-five U.S. cities, we determined whether changes in human thermal comfort were coincident with warming and more humid atmospheric conditions. We tested for significant trends in CWHs for every season for each city for nighttime, daytime, and total (i.e., night and day) periods. Although approximately 75 percent of the cities did not experience significant changes in CWHs on an annual basis, total changes in CWHs were marked by increases during spring and decreases in summer conditions, with the largest positive changes in CWHs found during spring nights, spring days, and autumn nights and the largest negative changes during summer nights and days. Spatially, increases in CWHs were principally located west of 117°W and decreases in cities east of 81°W. Significant relationships existed between wellness metrics and seasonal and annual CWHs. Greater CWHs during the summer were positively correlated with happiness and well-being and negatively correlated with obesity. These results suggest that further declines in summer CWHs for cities might affect human wellness, as peak optimal weather conditions shift toward spring and autumn months.
33-3459
Ecosystem. Soil. Spatial analysis.
Soils on many of the outwash plains in southwestern Michigan have loamy upper profiles, despite being underlain by sand-textured outwash. The origin of this upper, loamy material has long been unknown. The purpose of this study is to analyze the spatio-textural characteristics of these loamy-textured sediments to ascertain their origin(s). The textural curves of this material have distinct bimodality, with clear silt and sand peaks. Because the sand peaks align with those in the outwash below, we conclude that the upper material is a mixture of an initially silty material with the sand from below, forming loamy textures. By applying a textural filtering operation to the data, we determined its original characteristics; nearly all of the soils originally had silt loam upper profiles, typical for loess. Field data showed that the loamy material is thickest east of a broad, north–south trending valley (the Niles-Thornapple Spillway) that once carried glacial meltwater. The material becomes thinner, generally better sorted, and finer in texture eastward, away from this channel. We conclude that the loamy mantle on many of the adjacent outwash plains is silt-rich loess, derived from the Niles-Thornapple Spillway and its tributary channels and transported on mainly westerly winds. The spillway was active between ca. 17.3 and 16.8 k cal. years ago. At this time, a large network of tunnel channels existed beneath the stagnant Saginaw lobe ice. Meltwater from the lobe funneled silt-rich sediment into the spillway, rendering it a prodigious silt source.
33-4 GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS
33-3460
Intellectual property. Military. Occupations. War.
This article reviews the military duties of a number of U.S. geographers during World War II. It divides those duties into three kinds: spies, teachers, and occupiers. In each case, a specific form of geographical expertise was deployed—instrumental to achieving a particular military end. In particular, the article examines the roles of geographers: first, in the analysis of military intelligence at the Office of Strategic Services; second, in the provision of geographical courses for the university-based Civil Affairs Training School and the Army Specialized Training Program; and, finally, as agents of occupation in Japan once World War II ended.
33-3461
Africa. Livelihoods. Mobility. Sexuality. Youth.
Age is now considered alongside other differentiating categories for exploring mobility experiences, yet little work has emerged conceptualizing the im/mobilities of marginalized young people living in particularly difficult circumstances. This article, therefore, explores the relational im/mobilities of young female sex workers in Ethiopia aged between fourteen- and nineteen-years-old to understand how their livelihoods are shaped by the connections between their relations with others, im/mobilities, and survival in everyday life. The article draws on detailed narratives and participatory mobility mapping with sixty young sex workers in two locations in Ethiopia. Conceptually this article moves beyond sedentary and nomadic conceptions of mobility to what Jensen (2009) termed critical mobility thinking, where lives do not just happen in static enclaves or nomadic wanderings but are connected through multiple communities of interest and across time and space. Through these processes, everyday livelihoods are shaped and experienced. Further, drawing on Massey’s (2005) relational geographical theory, where sociotemporal practices constitute places in a complex web of flows, the article reveals that young sex workers’ critical im/mobilities are relational: Their livelihoods and identities are shaped within and between places based on their ability to move or not. The article reveals that these relational im/mobilities are important for securing work, protection, and accessing services, both within and between places and across a variety of sex work livelihoods. The article concludes by demonstrating that consideration of livelihoods as relational and mobile is central for the development of appropriate interventions.
33-3462
Geography. History. History of planning. Military. United States.
In the United States, Geography and the military have never been far apart. Their intertwined history has been essential to the discipline’s institutional reproduction and the workings of U.S. imperialism. Recent instances of militarism in Geography return this history to the fore, posing a number of challenges. They demonstrate the futility of geographical research for its own sake, naïvely assuming that knowledge of the world produced by geographers is inherently neutral. That same attitude leaves Geography powerless to confront its utility to the military, treating the discipline’s militarization as an inevitable coincidence. The current appearance of militarism in U.S. Geography proves both positions untenable. Confronting the extent of this relationship, both past and present, draws attention to how militarism shapes Geography’s objects of inquiry and methods of research. That effort must be matched by documentation of the variety of ways in which geographical knowledge is appropriated for military ends. The task is enormous and can only be done collectively lest geographers want to blindly surrender the legitimacy of the discipline to its military application.
33-3463
Clustering. Clusters. Geographic information systems. Geographic patterning. Neighborhood change.
The spatial pattern of longitudinal trends in neighborhood socioeconomic dynamics has long been implied by traditional urban models dating back to the Chicago School; however, empirical studies beyond the mapping of change between two points in time are surprisingly limited. This article introduces a methodology to the study of spatial–temporal patterns of neighborhood socioeconomic change. The approach first involves establishing discrete classes of neighborhoods following a k-means clustering procedure and then applies a sequential pattern mining algorithm to determine the similarity of longitudinal sequences. Sequences are then clustered to derive a typology of neighborhood trajectories. The method is employed in an empirical analysis of neighborhood change from 1970 to 2010 for all census tracts in the cities of Chicago and Los Angeles. In Chicago, this time period was marked by a sustained process of center city revitalization through two distinct upgrading processes, whereas in Los Angles, neighborhood upgrading largely came in the form of suburban upgrading. The spatial structure of neighborhood dynamics in Chicago resembled patterns described by Chicago School theorists, whereas the dynamics of Los Angeles deviated from this ordered regularity.
33-3464
Agriculture. Management. Organic pollution. Tourism. Volunteering.
This article deploys the anarchist notion of self-management to critically investigate the global organic farming network World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) as an initiative that offers insights into the possibilities and challenges of encounter. WWOOF facilitates the giving of food, accommodation, and hands-on learning experiences for volunteers, in exchange for their labor on organic farms. It operates as a moneyless sharing economy, designed as a site of mutual learning and cultural exchange. Literatures on encounter divide between brief tourist encounters of difference and everyday encounters in diverse, usually urban, communities. In linking these two bodies of work, I argue that the principle of self-management, as conceived by anarchist thinkers, can help develop a unified, critical framework for making sense of encounter event spaces. This adds important nuance to theorizations of encounter by recognizing the entwinement of the intimate and the structural, foregrounding the capacity of people to autonomously create shared spaces of interdependence. The case study indicates that structural contradictions and inequalities in voluntary relationships within statist-capitalist systems can seriously undermine otherwise promising interpersonal encounters. By articulating self-management as a tool for both analyzing and producing spaces of encounter, this article offers new possibilities for a more holistic and unified analytical framework.
33-3465
Education. Ethics. Peacekeeping. Surveillance.
Geography, although long used for war, offers powerful tools for making peace. Yet in a context of pervasive surveillance and high military interest in geography, it is important to be cautious that research is not misused or even weaponized (used by armed actors to do harm). This possibility should be more explicitly discussed in methods classes, committees, and ethics reviews. It is heartening that there is a growing commitment in geography to doing work for peace and justice, but given current levels of both military and police surveillance, we could all use more tools and guidance for how to do such work ethically. These conversations are currently rare. Geography methods textbooks say surprisingly little on the misuse of research more generally and nothing about armed actors in particular. We could also offer each other tips on how to look for and track the use of our research by the military and share more stories of what we have found. The potential of weaponization should not scare us off from peace and justice research but rather inspire us to do that work more carefully, which includes having more sophisticated conversations about potential misuse. Not only do we need to be wary of, teach, and speak out against the growing military use of geography, but I also urge us to work for a growing but careful use of the tools and insights of geography in struggles for peace and justice.
33-3466
Geographic information systems. Geography. Representation. Research. Science and technology.
Case studies have long been a gold standard for investigating causal mechanisms in human–environment interactions. Yet it remains a challenge to generalize across case studies to produce knowledge at broader regional and global scales even as the effort to do so, mostly using metastudy methods, has accelerated. One major obstacle is that the geographic context of case study knowledge is often presented in a vague and incomplete form, making it difficult to reuse and link with the regional and global contexts within which it was produced and is therefore most relevant. Here we assess the degree to which the quality of geographic description in published land change case studies limits their effective reuse in spatially explicit global and regional syntheses based on 437 spatially bounded cases derived from 261 case studies used in published land change metastudies. Common ambiguities in published representations of case geographic contexts were identified and scored using three indicators of geographic data quality for reuse in spatially explicit regional and global metastudy research. Statistically significant differences in the quality of case geographic descriptions were evident among the six major disciplinary categories examined, with the earth and planetary sciences evidencing greater clarity and conformance scores than other disciplines. The quality of case geography reporting showed no statistically significant improvement over the past fifty years. By following a few simple and readily implemented guidelines, case geographic context reporting could be radically improved, enabling more effective case study reuse in regional to global synthesis research, thereby yielding substantial benefits to both case study and synthesis researchers.
33-3467
Critical analysis. Environment. Geopolitics. Security.
As part of a discussion on geography and militarism, this article describes my work with midlevel officers in the Army Special Operations Forces who enroll in a graduate-level course I teach on environmental geopolitics. The theoretical framework for the course is critical geopolitics, a highly relevant subfield for these students but one to which most of them have never been exposed. Here, I draw from critical security studies and discuss what I teach to these students before providing examples of how they demonstrate what they learn in the class. Throughout the article, I consider how this work in some ways destabilizes an academic–military binary and how, at other times, the dividing line is clear. I suggest that critical scholarship might usefully continue to engage with groups beyond the academy.
33-3468
Borders. China. Geopolitics. Mobility. Tourism.
This article analyzes outbound tourism from mainland China to Hong Kong and Taiwan, two territories claimed by the People’s Republic of China, to unpack the geopolitics of the state and the everyday, to theorize the mutual constitution of the tourist and the nation-state, and to explore the role of tourism in new forms of protest and resistance. Based on ethnographies of tourism practices and spaces of resistance conducted between 2012 and 2015 and supported by ethnographic content analysis, this article demonstrates that tourism mobilities are entangled with shifting forms of sovereignty, territoriality, and bordering. The case of China, the world’s fastest growing tourism market, is exemplary. Tourism is profoundly affecting spatial, social, political, and economic order throughout the wider region, reconfiguring leisure spaces and economies, transportation infrastructure, popular political discourse, and geopolitical imaginaries. At the same time that tourism is being used to project Chinese state authority over Taiwan and consolidate control over Tibet and Xinjiang, it has also triggered popular protest in Hong Kong (including the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement and its aftermath), and international protest over the territorially contested South China Sea. This article argues that embodied, everyday practices such as tourism cannot be divorced from state-scale geopolitics and that future research should pay closer attention to its unpredictable political instrumentalities and chaotic effects. In dialogue with both mobilities research and borders studies, it sheds light not only on the vivid particularities of the region but on the cultural politics and geopolitics of tourism in general.
33-3469
Food. Food industry. Mobility. United States.
Most research on urban food deserts has employed spatial measures of accessibility, recording distances to various food stores from place of residence. Despite the popularity of this approach, empirical support for its prediction of dietary and health outcomes has been inconsistent. One reason might be the ways in which food deserts frame food access as fundamentally an issue of food supply. This article suggests a complementary approach that examines how store characteristics, neighborhood context, and individual mobility interact to shape food provisioning practices. I recruited thirty-eight participants living in two low-income neighborhoods of Minneapolis, Minnesota, tracking their daily mobility and the food sources they used over a five-day study period. Follow-up interviews gathered more information on the food stores used by participants. Project results show that participants were highly mobile in their food shopping, visiting 153 different locations on 217 different shopping trips at an average distance of 3.4 km from home. Reported store quality was closely tied to neighborhoods’ economic and racial composition, and in several cases, food purchasing and consumption occurred en route to other destinations. Future research on urban food access could benefit by studying how food access is intertwined with broader livability issues such as housing and transportation.
33-3470
Citizenship. Mobility. Politics. Youth.
Citizenship is given form, meaning, and power through the transactions and circulations that constitute it. Our focus in this article is the ways in which circulations through networks and institutions that extend beyond nation-states are enacted and encouraged through pedagogies and practices that moor habits of citizenship in daily lives. Although there has been significant attention to those practices at national and local levels, there has been relatively little attention to the ways that floating sites of citizenship formation are entwined with, but also seem to be suspended above, other sites. There are at least three ways in which circulations both construct those sites and are entwined in citizenship formation: They are the reason that the seeming contradiction between cosmopolitanism and efforts to moor citizens to place becomes unremarkable; they enable and shape the modes of interaction that conjoin politics and emotional geographies; and they are part of the way in which a common understanding of active citizenship is accepted almost without question. We use the examples of two international conferences for young citizen-activists to illustrate our arguments regarding the circulations of ideas, norms, and practice that are central to citizenship formation.
33-3471
Human geography. Military. Spatial analysis. Terrain. United States.
In recent years, the U.S. military-intelligence community has shown a growing interest in human geography. This article examines the available literature to consider this trend. I contend that the growing military-intelligence use of human geography, both as a concept and as a practice, deserves critical scrutiny. Although military involvement in geographical research is a long-standing and well-recognized fact, the growing emphasis on human geography per se marks a notable shift: not only a change in terminology—from anthropology of human terrain to human geography and geospatial intelligence—but also a shift in underlying military strategy and concepts. Because this shift has potentially profound implications for the discipline, substantive debate over the military’s employment of human geography is urgently needed.
33-3472
Culture. Heritage. Identity. Regions.
This article uses data on two vernacular traces, toponyms and business names, to explore and analyze cultural geographies of the U.S. Appalachian region. First, cluster detection is applied to a set of generic place names (toponyms) that are found to be components of a relatively unique Appalachian geographic vernacular. The results from this exercise are then mapped onto common spatial representations of the Appalachian region, where they are combined with a selected marker of perceived regional identity—businesses that have the character string “Appalachia” in their name—to construct a study area for subsequent analysis. Finally, data are collected for places inside of the derived study area to examine determinants of Appalachian identity in a zero-inflated count regression model. The findings convey important insights about specific heritage and environmental variables that correlate with, and likely contribute to the production of, patterns of Appalachian identity in the United States. In addition, the conceptual model and methodology of the article are claimed to be transferrable to other studies of cultural regions, heritage, and identity, both inside and outside of Appalachia.
33-3473
Cultural differences. Data. Diversity. Geography. Mobility. Proximity.
A largely unexplored big data application in urban contexts is how cultural ties affect human mobility patterns. This article explores China’s intercity human mobility patterns from social media data to contribute to our understanding of this question. Exposure to human mobility patterns is measured by big data computational strategy for identifying hundreds of millions of individuals’ space–time footprint trajectories. Linguistic data are coded as a proxy for cultural ties from a unique geographically coded atlas of dialect distributions. We find that cultural ties are associated with human mobility flows between city pairs, contingent on commuting costs and geographical distances. Such effects are not distributed evenly over time and space, however. These findings present useful insights in support of the cultural mechanism that can account for the rise, decline, and dynamics of human mobility between regions.
34. Transportation and Communication
34-2 TRANSPORTATION MODELING
33-3474
Infrastructure. Mobility. Railroads. Space. Spatial analysis. Transportation. United States.
Recent debates over space and spatiality have touched on a variety of different fields within geography but have rarely considered transportation or mobilities. Mobile objects and actors can be seen as occupying space only temporarily; as constructing space through their travels (including waiting to travel); as being present and absent before, after, and during their travels; or a host of other possibilities that complicate the geographer’s basic question: What is where? A theoretical consideration of the spatialities of transportation and mobilities could offer new analytic tools not only for scholars in these areas but for those interested in the production of space more broadly. It also offers the possibility to bring together transportation geography and mobilities under one framework. This article draws on the work of Kamil Skrbek, a Czech geographer active in the twentieth century, to explore four kinds of spaces: spaces of movement, spaces of transportation, structural transportation space, and areas of transportation. These four types include different extents infrastructure, vehicles, and passengers; places through which these objects pass or bypass; social, cultural, and economic discourses and meanings; and lived experiences of those within and outside of various transportation networks. Using the example of the shipment of crude oil by rail within North America, we explicate how these different spaces are relevant to the issue and what they offer to an analysis of this important topic that existing approaches cannot.
33-3475
Commuting. Housing. Job accessibility. Proximity. Simulation.
Based on the 1990–2010 Census Transportation Planning Package data of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, this research analyzes the temporal trends of commuting patterns in both time and distance. In comparison to previous work, commuting length is calibrated more accurately by Monte Carlo–based simulation of individual journey-to-work trips to mitigate the zonal effect. First, average commute distance kept climbing between 1990 and 2010, whereas average commute time increased between 1990 and 2000 but then slightly dropped toward 2010. Second, urban land use remained a good predictor of commuting pattern over time (e.g., explaining up to 90 percent of mean commute distance and about 30 percent of mean commute time). Finally, the percentage of excess commuting increased significantly between 1990 and 2000 and stabilized afterward.
33-3476
Bus transportation. City planning. Embodied practice. Informal sector. Urban areas.
This paper explores the movement of bodies in urbanising landscapes. In particular, it looks at the bodily practice that unfolds at a ‘bus stop made by stopping buses’ in peri-urban Mexico City. Doing so, I pursue three questions: What are the specificities of bodily practice in the peri-urban realm and out of what socio-material conditions do they emerge? How does this practice sit within notions of informality and cityness? And what urban imaginaries do peri-urban practitioners ‘grow’ out of their direct engagement with the material environment, that is, in this case, when taking buses? The bus stop in question is located in the municipality of Tecámac, State of Mexico, in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City (ZMVM). It is a site of pure activity, social occurrence without being forged into built form; a site with ‘nothing there’ but the encounter of travellers and buses along the Mexico City-Pachuca highway. Carefully examining the seemingly banal activity of flagging down and boarding buses, however, allows us to take seriously the bodily and material dimensions of urban life and to acknowledge their influence on how city is made and thought. The paper draws on ethnographic research with a focus on visual and sensory methods.
36. Environmenal Psychology/Environment, Behavior, and Society
36-1 ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION/COGNITION
33-3477
Politics. Public space. Refugees.
Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnographic research over 2 years I argue that these moments of pleasure are caesuras in the massive apparatus of power – welded from strands of work, neoliberal practice, nationalist certitudes and political exclusion – which binds these women. These acts of pleasure cannot easily be categorised as ‘resistance’ but I argue that they should not facilely be considered reinforcements of hegemonic control either. They are momentary and ephemeral recognitions of ordinary life lived in hard times, attempts at clawing back an instant of joy from the drudgery of the everyday, and a surrender to the enjoyment of conviviality in public and urban spaces. If they are at all political, they are so because such conviviality is ever harder to sustain in the calamity of hopelessness that characterises so much politics today.
33-3478
Arts. Disabilities. Impact. Learning. Methodology.
In this paper, we develop an expanded conception of listening as ‘being-with’ and explore this in the context of creative visual arts activities with people with learning disabilities. Through a series of textual and visual interlocutions between Inclusive Artist ‘Alice’, Social and Cultural Geographer ‘Hannah’ and members of the contemporary arts group ‘The Rockets’, we identify how an expanded conception of listening is practiced and the results it produce. Where listening for the Inclusive Artist includes an attentiveness to visual, verbal and gestural vocabularies of arts-based methods; the construction of conducive spaces for listening and voice with attuned collaborators and appropriate art materials; the use of art materials as ‘meeting points’, which enable a non-verbal conversation to take place and knowledge of how particular materials and practices can influence a person’s work and sense of themselves. The temporalities of these forms of expanded, attentive, curious listening are explored and concern is expressed about how they sit in opposition to the hasty demands for research with ‘impact’. We hope this paper provokes researchers to consider what it means to listen through arts-based methods, the crucial role of the facilitator and the temporalities of listening they are bringing into being.
33-3479
Air quality. Engineering. Environmental planning.
The main objective of this text is to warn against atmospherics. However comfortable it might appear, an atmosphere is politically suspicious because it numbs a body into an affective embrace of stability and permanence. It becomes doubly suspicious because a body desires to be part of the atmosphere. For this reason, I rethink both affect and atmosphere ontologically rather than phenomenologically. I argue that an atmosphere is engineered by subsuming individual affects to what I call, following Sloterdijk, an atmospheric glasshouse. I suggest that this happens in four steps: a distinction between inside and outside through partitioning; inclusion of the outside inside; illusion of synthesis; and dissimulation. In order to do this, I begin with air as the elemental paradox of ontological continuum and rupture. I carry on with the passage from air to atmosphere while retaining the discourse around continuum and rupture. Finally, I indicate a way of rupturing the atmospheric continuum through the ontological movement of withdrawal from the atmosphere. The ultimate goal of the article is to sketch a problematic of atmospherics that puts together without synthesising an elemental ontology of continuum and rupture.
33-3480
Communication. Digital divide. Information technology. Knowledge index. Politics. Social control.
The paper argues that the politics of lists start even before the existence of ready-made list. Rather, we have to focus on how the items of a list are produced. It is argued that list-making performs an analogue–digital conversion: it converts continuous material (e.g. narratives, arguments, descriptions) into discontinuous, isolated items. The history of professional indexing (from the 19th century to search engines) is used as an exemplary case for analyzing the practices of this conversion. It is argued that the often hidden work of indexing constitutes a politics of invisibility and that there exists a need for strategies that help to read the hidden ‘personalities’ of lists.
36-2 ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS/MEANING
33-3481
Nature. Plants. Public parks. Urban environments.
This article uses a surprising horticultural event—an unplanned, collective ‘theft’ of plants from the Montreal Botanical Garden in 1981—as impetus to interrogate the contribution of garden plants to public life in so-called ‘green’ cities of the late twentieth century. As sites of both social nature and material culture that are perceived as socially and environmentally beneficial and frequently designed to appear more-or-less natural, gardens are normally quite difficult to see or think in politically differentiated terms. Taking a historical ‘eventalization’ of civic horticulture as a means to enable critical perception, I develop the diagram (as introduced by Foucault and interpreted by Deleuze) as an analytical tool conducive to identifying and historicizing the perceptual and socio-spatial effects produced by the use of garden plants in urban public spaces. I outline the local historical context of the theft at the Botanical Garden and analyze the functioning of a program of horticultural beautification coincident with it as a means of establishing the theft’s more general intelligibility. This illuminates, not only a change in the functioning of plants in Montreal’s urban landscape, but also a means of recognizing the historical specificity of relations between people and plants, and socio-cultural change as morethan-human.
33-3482
Law. Security. Technology.
The List, one of the most archaic means of written enumeration and classification, has made a forceful recurrence in the post-9/11 global security landscape. From terrorist sanctions lists and No-Fly lists to ‘‘kill-lists’’ for drone warfare; from the privately compiled lists of risky banking clients to the regulatory lists of untrustworthy or incompliant companies, the list seems to proliferate as a contemporary technology of security and regulation. How and why are lists becoming newly embedded in security practices? What work do lists perform as specific techniques of government and forms of normative ordering? And what consequences follow for how problems of legal accountability and political responsibility are currently understood and addressed? This paper frames security lists as inscription devices that are heterogeneous, unpredictable and productive in unforeseen ways. It draws attention to the ways they materialize the categories they purport to describe, and how they enact novel forms of knowledge, jurisdiction and targeting. We suggest that critiques could be strengthened by making visible and contesting the fragmented and diffuse conditions through which security lists are produced.
33-3483
Aesthetics. Canada. Multiculturalism.
Critiquing dismissals in geography of the aesthetics of multicultural festivals as bland, superficial, and apolitical, this article illustrates how they can be also invigorating, imaginative, and empowering. To elaborate my argument, I draw on interviews and participant observations of the 2010 Fusion Festival (hereafter Fusion), an annual event located in the “ethnoburban” context of the city of Surrey, British Columbia. My theoretical framework uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of aesthetic “justification,” which refers to art’s capacity to infuse human experience with constructive meaning and affirmative power. For Nietzsche, aesthetic justification incorporates two artistic forces: the Apollonian, which refers to illusion, beauty, and order, and the Dionysian, which refers to music, sensuality, and ecstasy. The article explores three ways through which Apollonian and Dionysian delimitations of space and time justify the multicultural values and identities of Fusion’s participants: first, how the Apollonian illusions of “cultural pavilions” manifest the creative capacities of local communities; second, how musical and theatrical performances generate Dionysian senses of belonging among performers and audience members; and third, how the embodied and transfiguring practices of dancing, painting, singing, and dressing up shift perspectives in ways that affirm diversity, combat despair, and raise awareness about protecting the environment. The article concludes by considering some future directions in geographical research on the aesthetics of multicultural festivals.
33-3484
Africa. Deforestation. Ecology. Environmental planning. Forest regions. Narrative analysis. Politics.
In the late-1990s anthropologists James Fairhead and Melissa Leach declared in a series of seminal publications that mainstream understandings of Sierra Leonean forest cover history had greatly exaggerated its past extent and rate of conversion to other land uses. Using archival evidence, they recast the ‘official’ story as a product of antiquated European environmental philosophy rather than empirical data. Moreover, they found that it distorted environmental policy by perpetuating images of a mythological past in which once nearly universal forest cover had been (and continued to be) denuded and degraded by irrational, primitive rural agricultural practices. Building on this foundation, they developed a trenchant critique of the existing academic literature describing land cover change in Sierra Leone, discounting most findings on the grounds of the authors’ uncritical engagement with the colonial-era narrative. In this article we present a re-evaluation of this influential thesis, arguing that while their broader critique is quite sound, historical deforestation in Sierra Leone has most certainly been considerably exaggerated, Fairhead and Leach overreached in their dismissal of prior works. Drawing upon new empirical data, we revisit these debates and develop a more nuanced critical platform from which to understand Sierra Leone’s forest cover history.
33-3485
Asia. Critical pedagogy. Nature. Planning pedagogy.
Between 1975 and 1979, more than 2 million men, women, and children died in what has become known as the Cambodian genocide. In just under four years, approximately one quarter of the country’s prewar population succumbed to arbitrary murder, torture, detention, starvation, and disease. Amidst these acts of destruction, however, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK; the Khmer Rouge) advanced various pedagogical practices, including the promotion of poetry. Superficially, poems produced by the Khmer Rouge are literary forms of propaganda. Such a conclusion is incomplete. Through a reading of Khmer Rouge–era poetry, this article contributes to two themes in geography: fictive and public pedagogy. We argue that the Khmer Rouge used poetry as a form of public pedagogy. More specifically, Khmer Rouge–era poetry presented nature as the fulcrum on which society was to be transformed. The cultivation of a proper political consciousness required the nurturing of a community identity of what Democratic Kampuchea was to become. This argument is developed in five sections. First, we provide a brief overview of literary geographies. We then consider the transformative power of public education. Third, we provide an overview of educational policies under the Khmer Rouge. This is followed by a discussion of nature as conceived by the CPK. Our main empirical analysis of Khmer Rouge poetry is presented in the fifth section. Finally, we conclude with a consideration of the politics of creative interventions as a form of public pedagogy.
33-3486
Canada. Citizenship. Ecology. Political sociology. Politics. Subjectivity.
At the Joint Review Panel (JRP) for Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline across northern British Columbia, many participants presenting oral statements situated themselves as decidedly ‘ordinary’ people, with rich connections to the land and landscape. Without speaking of ownership, they nevertheless made claims to the area as their home through highly detailed articulations of knowledge and experience of its natural features. For some, it was also connected to a collective, indigenous territorial claim. In all cases, we argue that it is an articulation of ‘home,’ and that this formed the basis for the political subjectivity that led to their participation in the JRP hearings. Linking the scholarly literature on home with that of political ecology, in this paper we explore the significance of the assertion of experience and knowledge of the physical environment as the basis to claim it as ‘home’ and to assert a political right to defend it from perceived intrusion.
36-3 ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDE/AWARENESS/VALUES
33-3487
Commodity. Human geography. Labor markets. Political economy. Production. Values.
Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified but fails to analyse the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this paper proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Haraway’s concepts of ‘lively commodities’ and ‘encounter value’, foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The paper advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy.
33-3488
Democracy. Electoral change. Europe. Gender. Local autonomy. Politics. Social networks.
How to create radical democracy in a moment of crisis and austerity? On the one hand, geographies of autonomy, solidarity, and resistance can offer hope, promise, and utopian anticapitalist alternatives for future action. On the other hand, agonistic initiatives that discard consensus in favor of conflictive engagement with institutions of state rule can allow for pluralism and the acceptance of difference. Perhaps, however, actually existing democracy can be achieved through an emphasis on process that bridges both activist ideologies. Looking to competing forms of activism in Madrid’s housing movement, I identify two strands of action—radical autonomy versus agonistic engagement. Despite their profound disjunctures, however, I argue these strands complement each other to ultimately experience convergence, which in turn contributes to the flourishing of new political initiatives. Within this convergence, feminist perspectives attuned to difference have been crucial in forcing transformation through existing democratic structures. The resulting political projects engage with mechanisms of state rule while drawing on practices and procedures from autonomous struggles to elaborate frameworks for institutional change. In the process, I demonstrate the possibility of collaboration between competing modes of activism—often conceived as incommensurate—in the broader quest for emancipation from neoliberal state rule.
33-3489
Public space. Resistance. Subjectivity. Surveillance. Technology.
The introduction of technologies that monitor and track individuals to attribute suspicion and guilt has become commonplace in practices of order maintenance in public space. A case study of the introduction of a marker spray in Dutch urban public transport is used to conceptualise the role of technology in everyday resistances against surveillance. The introduction of this technology made available alternative subject positions. The notion of provocation is proposed for the opening up of social spaces by a technology. Through provocation, issues that do not find their expression in commonly accepted protocols and means of evidence are given a voice as a result of defiant, emotional and provisional technology usage. Attending to visible and defiant usages also opens up an agenda for examining the varying intensities at which technology operates.
33-3490
Conservation. Environmental governance. Mining. Mining industry.
This article draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of arborescent and rhizomic assemblages to examine encounters between large-scale conservation and grassroots resistance to industry. I explore how the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage listing of New Caledonia’s reefs contributed to the demise of Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous activist group that had been targeting a multinational mining project. I also interrogate how an assemblage’s form enables certain modalities of power while constraining others and how these differences in power modalities inform relationships between types of assemblages. Mistakenly expecting assistance in protecting their coral reef from mining impacts, Rhéébù Nùù relinquished the coercive power inherent to their rhizomic form in favor of participation in UNESCO’s arborescent structure via World Heritage “management committees”—a globally promoted, but locally inappropriate, comanagement diagram that targeted local fishing activities despite an absence of overfishing. Thus, this article argues that rhizomic structures have unique means of influence, exercised through particular modalities of power, which might be lost through cooptation into arborescent assemblages that exercise different modalities of power and might employ locally inappropriate diagrams. Ultimately, conservation does not only result in the extension of state powers, as the literature has shown; as this study demonstrates, it can surreptitiously support the extension of environmentally damaging industrial development at the expense of grassroots action.
33-3491
Commercial sector. Security. Topology.
This article looks closely at the politics of whitelists in commercial security. It argues that whitelists are essential for the current transformations in regulatory politics in which Codes of Conduct, Best Practices, Benchmarks and Standards are replacing more conventional, legally binding forms of regulation. The article traces how whitelists are tied to these transformations. The account is organized around how the practical, pragmatic and poetic character of lists (Umberto Eco) fashion the work and topological imprint (Manuel DeLanda) of whitelists in commercial security specifically. The article directs attention to the politics of the work and topological imprint of whitelists. This politics is neither hidden nor invisible yet it remains largely unnoted. It is dispersed, mundane and unspectacular. The whitelists are akin to minions whose activities are turning softly regulated commercial security into an infernal alternative (imagery borrowed from Pignarre and Stengers). As minions, whitelists appear insignificant when looked at in isolation. However, by describing their work as a decentralized, disjointed and disorganized group, this article shows their significance for the politics of regulation in commercial security. It advances a conceptualization of this politics and a theorization of its dynamics of relevance for engaging the politics of lists also elsewhere.
33-3492
Feminism. Geopolitics. Immigration. Military. Nationalism. Place. Race.
Drawing on analysis of qualitative interviews with 25 residents of an affluent, highly militarized suburb neighbouring a British immigration detention centre, this article analyses how constructions of place and home interrelate with nationalist, racialised and geopolitical boundaries. The article begins by introducing the fieldwork site before discussing the centrality of feminist geopolitics frameworks to the subsequent data analysis. The findings sections demonstrate how the centre and its detainees are routinely obscured by participants in relation to a suburb portrayed as simply ‘nice’ and homely. Analysis suggests that the mundane, everyday practices discussed by participants conceal the formation of simultaneously global, local and intimate boundaries rooted in nationalist and geopolitical distinctions with militarised and colonial histories. These boundaries are, however, partially unobscured locally for participants in relation to questions evoking the prospect of more intimate connections with detainees, and it is only by disavowing anxieties raised by this prospect that the legitimacy of detention and feelings of homeliness can be justified affectively and ethically. The conclusion argues that these findings are important for studies of contemporary border controls, as the same nationalist and racialized structures underpinning detention regimes are fundamentally implicated in embodied and emplaced notions of suburban homeliness.
33-3493
Activism. Climate change. Digital divide.
The Anthropocene, as a notion and a discursive field, is generating productive academic and broader debate. In this article, I analyse the creation of a crowdfunded climate change institution in Australia – the Climate Council – as an instance of everyday activism in the Anthropocene, and partly a function of the more-than-real. The more-than-real refers to the digital space that bore the Climate Council’s creation, and situates this spontaneous climate change activism. The broader context of this transformation included an abnormally hot spring season, a turn to conservative federal government, and already-active social media spaces. As an exploratory case study that introduces an example of activism steeped in desire, this research situates mainstream climate change activism squarely within the Anthropocene notion, where a large group of disaffected individuals transformed an organisation that they perceived as valuable. This type of climate change activism can be read as a productive possibility of the Anthropocene, and unsettles narratives of inevitable environmental devastation, while simultaneously raising questions of whether the Anthropocene concept can or should include digital spaces. The discourses working in, through and around the Climate Council transformation in the more-than-real are read as a disruption of the Anthropocene that may generate productive possibilities.
33-3494
Ethics. Geography. Mobility. Politics. Rights. Spatial analysis.
Estimates suggest that tens of millions of people skateboard for transport and pleasure—it is a mobility practice both instrumental and playful. That play is important for creativity, connection, and positive affect is known. Yet skating is often typified as mere vandalism, despite the fact that, intrinsic worth aside, its hybridity is instructive: It invites consideration of the spatial politics of the street and the possibility of accommodating this and, indeed, other forms of “alternative” movement. Arguably, the prospect of such generous geographies is fundamental to ideas about the right to the city, an entitlement embracing responsibilities to one another. Nevertheless, given the ongoing dominance of automobility and widespread anxieties about skating, the tendency has been to try and contain it in parks and regulate its presence on streets, not least by creating design solutions to render it difficult to engage in. A corollary of these strategies, in combination with skaters’ own resolve to claim rights to the city, is that skaters move on to roadways. These armatures have not been designed generously to accommodate forms of mobility apart from motor vehicles—and sometimes pedestrians and cyclists. Consequently, skaters are among the millions who die on the roads annually. In relative terms, the number is minute; nevertheless, each death invokes this question: How can we mobilize a spatial politics of street skating by thinking about the geographies of generosity in ways that might avoid such events? Reflecting on that question is the purpose of this article.
33-3495
Decision making. Farming. Households. Income. Land use changes. Market analysis. Scales.
As rural households worldwide become increasingly engaged in urban economies and regional and global markets, agricultural land use is increasingly under influences of macrolevel forces. Investigating the cross-scale processes behind land-use decisions of rural households is important for understanding the deferential effects of macrolevel forces across local social and environmental contexts. We combined quantitative analysis of household surveys and qualitative analysis of interviews and participant observations in eight villages in the Poyang Lake Region of China to investigate how macrolevel forces associated with policy reforms in China (i.e., urban job markets and agricultural markets) interact with microlevel factors (i.e., the biophysical environment, location, and household demographics) to shape land-use decisions of rural households. We also found differential regional government interventions that reinforced preexisting biophysical conditions to affect household crop choices, contributing to the maintenance of intensive two-season rice production in select agricultural bases. Our use of multilevel modeling and qualitative analysis enabled an improved understanding of the cross-scale processes behind household land-use decisions, which has practical implications for securing food production and promoting sustainable land use.
36-4 SOCIO-SPATIAL FACTORS
33-3496
Simulation. Space. Statistical analysis. Time.
Throughout most of human history, events and phenomena of interest have been characterized using space and time as their major characteristic dimensions, in either absolute or relative conceptualizations. Space–time analysis seeks to understand when and where (and sometimes why) things occur. In the context of several of the most recent and substantial advances in individual movement data analysis (time geography in particular) and spatial panel data analysis, we focus on quantitative space–time analytics. Based on more than 700 articles (from 1949 to 2013) we obtained through a key word search on the Web of Knowledge and through the authors’ personal archives, this article provides a synthetic overview about the quantitative methodology for space–time analysis. Particularly, we highlight space–time pattern revelation (e.g., various clustering metrics, path comparison indexes, space–time tests), space–time statistical models (e.g., survival analysis, latent trajectory models), and simulation methods (e.g., cellular automaton, agent-based models) as well as their empirical applications in multiple disciplines. This article systematically presents the strengths and weaknesses of a set of prevalent methods used for space–time analysis and points to the major challenges, new opportunities, and future directions of space–time analysis.
33-3497
Flow networks. Language. Social spaces. Spatial relationships.
This article explores the spatial status of written texts in the urban environments of the digital age. I suggest that part of what writing does in and for the urban environment in such context is more productively captured by understanding writing not only as a communication technology but a spatial technology as well. I propose the concept of ambient text to ground my exploration of the spatiality of writing in the observational context of a busy New York City street. I then use Manuel Castells’ distinction between the space of places and the space of flows as a useful heuristic to explore theoretically the contribution of writing to contemporary urban social spatiality in the sociotechnical context of the digital age. I argue that writing takes up new spatial roles and can be thought of as an infrastructure that helps the space of places and the space of flows ‘‘hook up.’’ The general argument is that our relationship to written texts is being reconfigured by spatial dynamics for which texts in turn do important work. The idea that texts directly produce social space (the becoming space of writing) leads to an incremental, additive view of social space, which is briefly discussed.
33-3498
Data. Organizational capabilities. Social theory.
The ability of search engines to shape our understandings of the world by controlling what people discover when looking for information is well known. We argue that the power of search engines has become further entrenched in the wake of the current move to restructure the Web according to the logics of ‘linked data’ and the ‘semantic Web’. With the goal of sharing information according to structured formats that computers (rather than humans) can easily process and analyse, linked data engineers are abstracting information from fact sharing websites like Wikipedia into short, uniform statements that can be more efficiently shared, compared and analysed. In response to this enhanced power by search engines and the corresponding loss of agency by ordinary users, some Wikipedians have challenged the ways in which data from the encyclopedia has been used (often without credit) by search engines like Google. Using the capabilities approach first developed by Amartya Sen, we interrogate exactly what some Wikipedians believe they are losing when they complain about how Google represents facts about the world obtained from Wikipedia and other sites.
33-3499
Asia. Economic diversity. Geography.
From today’s perspective, early 20th century ‘Area Studies’ texts represent a relic form of geographical research and writing. These compendiums of place-based knowledge present what we now consider to be a layperson’s understanding of ‘geography’ – details of landforms, climate, land use, economic activities, urban patterns and so on. This empirical content is described in language littered with the judgemental adjectives associated with hierarchical knowledge systems such as environmental determinism, economic stage theory and theories of modern state formation. In this essay I interrogate one subset of these texts, namely those that were written about Tropical or Monsoon Asia, as it was often referred to. I situate the publication of these geographies with respect to major shifts in human and earth systems and outline some preliminary ideas for how we could re-read these texts to recover place-based knowledge that might inform current research on economic resilience in Southeast Asia.
33-3500
Human activity. Humanitarianism. War.
In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the IDF on social media. Exposing the connection between the re-signification of space and the constitution of a civilian as a shield, we maintain that the infographics are part of a broader apparatus of discrimination deployed by Israel to frame its violence post hoc in order to claim that this violence was utilized in accordance with international law. We conclude by arguing that the relatively recent appearance of human shields highlights the manifestation of a contemporary political antinomy: human shields have to continue to be considered protected civilians, but since they are considered an integral part of the hostilities they are transformed into killable subjects.
33-3501
Change. Children. Enclosure. Environment. Housing. Housing development. Play. Schools.
Transformations of the landscapes which children inhabit have significant impacts on their lives; yet, due to the limited economic visibility of children’s relationships with place, they have little stake in those transformations. Their experience, therefore, illustrates in an acute way the experience of contemporary enclosure as a mode of subordination. Following fieldwork in three primary schools in South Cambridgeshire, UK, we offer an ethnographic account of children’s experiences of socio-spatial exclusion. Yet, we suggest that such exclusion is by no means an end-point in children’s relationships with place. Challenging assumptions that children are disconnected from nature, we argue that through play and imaginative exploration of their environments, children find ways to rebuild relationships with places from which they find themselves excluded.
33-3502
Human geography. Social theory. Spatial analysis. Topology.
Through a critical deployment of the surface/depth metaphor, this article explores the catalytic potential of topological thinking to establish points of articulation between apparently opposed notions and canons of thought. Starting from a genealogy of mathematical developments and philosophical mediations toward the end point of geography, we address the interplay between the formal (axiomatic) and conceptual (problematic) dimensions of topology in suggesting some potentially alternative ways of re-imagining the role of topological thinking for spatial theory and human geography.
33-3503
Adult entertainment industry. Neoliberalism. Space.
Through his three films London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins, Patrick Keiller has sought, inter alia, to provide an incisive commentary on the neo-liberal social order and the way that the spaces we inhabit are experienced and represented. Keiller’s films draw from a variety of sources including: surrealism; political economy; cinematic theory; and architecture. Yet, although there is a considerable body of commentary on his work, there is less analysis that engages in a detailed way with the substance of the work itself – its images and techniques – or with the framework within which it operates. Our aims are twofold: first, to redress that omission here, and especially to attend to what appears to be the divergent character of the most recent film, Robinson in Ruins, when considered in relation to the framework established by the first two – a divergence that directly implicates Keiller’s thematisation of landscape; and, second, to reflect more broadly on the wider significance of Keiller’s films for geography and other critically inspired scholarship.
33-3504
Area studies. Conversation. Human geography.
This essay works through how seeing Caribbean Studies from my singular location – a Caribbean diaspora human geographer based in the UK but interested in the Caribbean as an area of study – leads to ‘conversations’ with a range of differently located academics, and locates Caribbean Studies in very particular ways. The particular concept of conversation comes through Hall’s (1993) Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, published as ‘Negotiating Caribbean Identities’ in New Left Review. This routing leads to two critiques of defining one’s own cultural and disciplinary identity through Caribbean Studies, and also points to a renewal of Caribbean Studies, through unending conversations in and with the region.
33-3505
Mobility. Neoliberalism. Policy. Technology. Topology.
This paper considers how the technocracy contributes to the mobilisation of policy, and in doing so suggests that this allows for a systematic explanation for policy mobility that is based on a particular form of expert practice rather than ideologies such as neoliberalism. It argues that the technocracy has topographies through which different places are materially connected and through which policy knowledge flows in various forms. But it also has topologies that emerge from the practice of measurement through which often distant places can be made to loom much larger, or nearby places fade into insignificance. Together they help to materialise the spaces ‘in between’ policy-making sites through which policy is often transferred. Considering the technocracy in this way demonstrates how apparently autonomous political–economic contexts shape patterns of policy mobility and state change.
33-3506
Africa. Data. Development. Mobility. Telecommunications.
This paper examines the ethical and methodological problems with tracking human mobility using data from mobile phones, focusing on research involving low- and middle-income countries. Such datasets are becoming accessible to an increasingly broad community of researchers and data scientists, with a variety of analytical and policy uses proposed. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art in this area of research, then sets out a new analytical framework for such data sources that focuses on three pressing issues: first, interpretation and disciplinary bias; second, the potential risks to data subjects in low- and middle-income countries and possible ethical responses; and third, the likelihood of ‘function creep’ from benign to less benign uses. Using the case study of a data science challenge involving West African mobile phone data, I argue that human mobility is becoming legible in new, more detailed ways, and that this carries with it the dual risk of rendering certain groups invisible and of misinterpreting what is visible. Thus, this emerging ability to track movement in real time offers both the possibility of improved responses to conflict and forced migration, but also unprecedented power to surveil and control unwanted population movement.
36-5 LIFESTYLE
33-3507
Race. Regulation. Trust.
Using a case study of a recent UK whitelist intended to regulate online gambling, I examine the affective politics of listing. I pay particular attention to the racial dynamics of black and white listing. By charting how the gambling whitelist worked and failed to work as a tool in the designation of jurisdictional reputation, I argue that the use and subsequent abandonment of the whitelist shows the centrality of racial dynamics to listing practices. This is particularly evident in relation to how the list was deployed in debates about the trustworthiness of the Kahnawá:ke territory and Antigua and Barbuda. In the final section I explore the racialized affective practices forged after the demise of the online gambling whitelist. Although non-listing techniques of governance look to be expanding, in the form of increased surveillance of individual players, lists continue to play a key role in the UK government’s new model of gambling regulation. I suggest that this confirms the continuing importance of black and white lists as techniques of governance, and the value of exploring them and their racialized implications together.
33-3508
Embodied practice. Mobility. Parenting. Subjectivity.
This paper is about the entanglements or mutually affecting engagements with the material world that occur in the course of trying to becoming mobile with a small baby. Drawing on a rigorous empirical base of 37 interviews with 20 families in East London, we analyse the relationships between discourses of parenting and the material practices of journey-making. Bringing together conceptual work on the new materialism and mobility studies, we advance the concept of mother–baby assemblages as a way to understand mobile motherhood, and consider the emotional and affective dimensions of parenting in public that emerge through journey-making. We argue that the transition to motherhood occurs in part through entanglements with the more than human in the course of becoming mobile (including matter, affects, policies and built form). We further argue that approaching motherhood from the perspective of material entanglements advances geographical scholarship by deepening our understanding of mobility as a relational practice. Finally, we extend conceptual work in Geography as a whole by showing the utility of new materialist philosophy as a means for theorising identity.
33-3509
Asia. Citizenship. Class. Gender. Geopolitics. Higher education. Politics.
Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork in Singapore, this article uses the case of young people studying at a private higher education institute to study the biopolitical geographies of student life. I focus on the analytic lens of biopolitical citizenship as one way to understand how biopower works in and through the material relations and practices of social reproduction. I critically examine how young people are engaging with and performing biopolitics in ways that attempt to (re)define what constitutes a “mainstream,” viable, classed, and gendered citizenship life. I also explore students’ (“alternative”) biopolitical performances through their critical evaluations of state-led discourses, their ability to invent hope as a way of coping and living, and their online enactment of a form of modest activism. Additionally, this article offers an initial engagement with Kraftl’s (2015) theorization of alternative biopolitical projects in educational spaces and introduces the concepts of “pulling” and “pushing” to frame the paradoxical manner in which young people engage with biopolitics.
33-3510
Cultural communities. Digital divide. Industry. Media. Work.
In this paper I examine entrepreneurial work in San Francisco’s digital media sector to consider how affect and desire are invested in sites of neoliberal production. Drawing on recent writing on affect, I treat affect as ambivalent and coextensive with the mode of production, suggesting an approach that looks beyond the investment of value in commodities, to how desire is produced and directly located in economic infrastructures. Entrepreneurial affect functions through the embodiment of work as a site of personal ‘‘satisfaction,’’ the development of passionate attachments to that work, and the production of working subjectivities characterized by their ‘‘compulsory sociality.’’ I argue that affect functions through entrepreneurial forms of digital media work to produce and reproduce attachments to precarious working conditions. Drawing on recent debates on precariousness and precarity, I reflect on the possible consequences of affective attachments to entrepreneurial work as a primary site for the justification of precarious work practices and neoliberal modes of governance in general.
33-3511
Animals. Biodiversity. Capitalism. Economy. Human geography.
The opening of a post-genomic age and the possibility of patenting life itself have changed the relationship between biopolitics and capitalism and contributed to the emergence of a new phase of capitalist accumulation, currently known as biocapitalism, the full integration of life and capital into complex architectures of control and ownership. In this paper, we combine Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of the threshold and bios/zoe− with Nicole Shukin’s idea of rendering to address the connection between life and death in biocapitalism, through a specific focus on the commercialisation of the semen of the Piedmontese bulls. We show how death, rather than merely life, is productive in biocapitalism. Further, in proposing an analysis of some of the ways in which, social and biological, animal life gets incorporated (i.e. owned and sold), we contribute to recent debates in geography on more-than-human understanding of capital accumulation.
33-3512
Culture. Migration. Mobility.
Culture shock is when the experience of difference is seen to emotionally overwhelm a migrant. In this paper, I look at how the Global Mobility Industry, an industry that acts as an outsourcer for international human resource management processes, seeks to treat culture shock in the corporate expatriate. Through arguing that different cultures become medicalised as a risk to the expatriate, the paper makes two key points. First, there is a need to understand the way in which migration industries play a role in producing how migrants experience migration, with the paper illustrating a way through which we can conceptually engage with how the Global Mobility Industry manages encounter. Second, through this I argue that there are spaces out with the ‘contact zone’ through which encounter is learnt, highlighting a need and providing a theoretical basis for how research on migrant identities can explore different sites through which migrant subjectivities are produced as part of their journey’s abroad.
33-3513
Identity. Nation-states. Politics. Religion.
Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), the German-Jewish theologian and philosopher, presents us with what can be called a ‘politics of Judaic theology’. Focussing on the particularities of Judaic time and space in his major work, The Star of Redemption (1921), this article argues for the importance of revisiting Rosenzweig to recuperate a history of thought opposed to the entailments of secular time with sovereign territory. Essaying between Rosenzweig’s early 20th-century theology and the political present, I then bring him into dialogue with the voices of Judith Butler and Jaqueline Rose who, from the varying perspectives of ethics and psychoanalysis, insist on an originary displacement at the heart of Jewish identity and, with this, the impossibility of any project of national affirmation. Indeed, when read together with contemporary challenges to political Zionism, I suggest that Rosenzweig’s theological understandings of space and time offer an alternative – and anterior – perspective from which to critique the ambitions of the Jewish nation-state.
33-3514
Colonialism. Neoliberalism. Tourism.
This paper critically examines the intersections of global tourism and fitness in the Marathon des Sables, an annual ultramarathon in the Sahara desert in which over a thousand athletes run the equivalent of five marathons in six days. It demonstrates how the globalization of health and fitness resonates with familiar Western productions of exotic cultures for the purposes of tourist consumption. Of particular interest here is how established colonial asymmetries are recast in a neoliberal context as runners test their resilience, endurance and strength against an ‘extreme’ Saharan landscape. While the paper calls attention to these asymmetries, it is more concerned with troubling reductive colonial encounters in order to reveal their instability, heterogeneity and ambivalence. Indeed, the central conceit of the Marathon des Sables – that superior Western fitness regimes and technologies will dominate the race – is inverted by the overwhelming success of Moroccan runners and disaggregated by the biopolitical regulation of elite running bodies. These unexpected intersections of global tourism and fitness demand further attention because they reconfigure our received notions of who (and what) is capable of exerting agency in postcolonial encounters.
33-3515
Flow networks. Infrastructure. Urban areas. Urban governance.
This paper examines the increased visibility of urban infrastructures occurring through a close coupling of information technologies and the selective integration of urban services. It asks how circulatory flow is managed in the contemporary city, by focusing on the emergence of new forms of governmentality associated with ‘‘smart’’ technologies. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, and based on a case study of Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Centre (COR), the paper argues that new understandings of the city are being developed, representing a new mode of urban infrastructure based on the partial and selective rebundling of splintered networks and fragmented urban space. The COR operates through a ‘‘un-black boxing’’ of urban infrastructures, where the extension of control room logics to the totality of the city points to their fragility and the continuous effort involved in their operational accomplishment. It also functions through a collapse in relations of control—of the everyday and the emergency—which, enabled by the incorporation of the public in operational control, further raise public awareness of urban infrastructures. These characteristics point to a specific form of urban governmentality based on the operationalisation of infrastructural flows and the development of novel ways of seeing and engaging with the city.
33-3516
Gender. Geography. Morality. Religion. Youth.
This paper examines a series of anxieties about mixing at the Jewish Lads’ Brigade and Club (JLB & C) in Manchester, UK during the 1950s and 1960s, primarily focused on inter-faith activities, relationships and marriages. This paper explores how a powerful moral geography of gender and religion came to be shaped, regulated and negotiated at this youth work space. The concerns expressed by some adults over teenage encounters in the post-war city were articulated and understood through the notion of ‘atmospheres’, and this paper suggests how this idea and language captured some of the anxieties and emotions surrounding cultures of leisure at this time. This paper contributes an in-depth and sustained focus on the moral geographies of the post-war city in relation to young people, as well as addressing an important gap in scholarship on Jewish youthful religiosities. Furthermore, it pushes at ideas about meaningful encounters through the consideration of the JLB & C as a meeting space and arena for visitors. Overall, the paper examines how the JLB & C acted as both a mirror to the wider social changes of the post-war era, while also being an active contributor in shaping those same processes of social change.
33-3517
Area studies. Politics. Social theory.
Italian Theory has emerged as the result of the search for new conceptual frameworks in the face of a series of international political events concerning not only the proliferation of states of exception but also of new forms of politicization of life related to biomedical science and the biosecurization of spaces. In this essay, I consider how Italian Theory has come into existence in Western academia and beyond through its productive travels among area studies, the humanities, and the social sciences. In particular, I reflect on how US-based Italian Studies—joining forces with scholars in other fields on the two sides of the Atlantic—engage in practices of trans-lation that fundamentally contribute to the ‘‘packing’’ of contemporary Italian political philosophy as ‘‘Italian Theory’’. Such practices have significantly impacted on Human Geography and the social sciences in general, and influenced how highly theoretical work originated outside the Anglophone ‘‘academic core’’ is (re)produced, legitimated, and circulated internationally.
33-3518
Citizenship. Homosexuality. Multiculturalism. Politics. Sexuality. Urban policy.
This paper mobilizes an Arendtian understanding of politics emphasizing plurality and appearance in order to examine a series of projects convened by the City of Sydney council between 2010 and 2013 that were intended to address issues faced by queer people from ‘‘culturally and linguistically diverse’’ communities. Drawing on interviews with participants, as well as archival materials, I argue that these efforts carved out spaces in which racialized queer people in Sydney could appear politically and in which the uneven geographies produced by the mutually constitutive regimes of sexuality and race could become an object of differentially shared concern. Yet, these projects were themselves necessarily shaped by the very dynamics of racialization and normativity to which they responded, and the paper asks how we might differently live with and beyond the fantasy of multicultural queer inclusion at work in these efforts. In doing so, this paper suggests a different way of relating to the binaries (radical/assimilationist, disruption/recognition, state/non-state) that have informed many queer analyses and also contributes to literatures in critical urban and political geography that seek to develop contextually-sensitive understandings of politics that can account for more modest forms of political engagement with existing orders.
33-3519
Automobiles. Consumption. Wealth.
In 20th century media coverage of the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, reporters devoted an inordinately large amount of space to describing (often disapprovingly) how the people of that region utilized Cadillacs. Having been confronted with this puzzle in the archive (i.e. what work was being done by so frequently associating these territories with Cadillacs?), this paper argues that in popular imaginations, change in the world economy—especially the rise of ‘‘nouveau riche territories’’—is often understood in terms of personified and objectified dramas of right/wrong, which perform the work of distinction. By drawing on an analysis of newspaper and magazine articles and bringing together consumption, psychoanalytic, and post-colonial literatures, this article makes two contributions to understanding how positional anxieties function transnationally: (1) by arguing that places like the Gulf States can have impacts on geoeconomic imaginations that far outpace their size, because these states and their people are seen to break the constellation of practices associated with having obtained the ‘‘good life’’, thus creating a boundary between them and ‘‘normalcy’’; and, (2) by demonstrating that stories of nouveau riche consumption gain force through interaction with psychically charged objects like Cadillacs, through a process called ‘‘extimacy’’.
33-3520
Canada. Gender. Local autonomy. Work.
In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler writes about how a shared sense of fear and vulnerability opens the possibility of recognizing interdependency. This is a wider understanding of precarity than is often present in human geography – recognizing the consequences and possibilities of feeling precarious. Focusing on work and the workplace, I examine the working life stories of millennial women in Canada, a labour market where unemployment and underemployment are common experiences for young workers. Using work narratives of insecurity, I argue that one potential consequence of understanding precariousness is the recognition of our social selves, using millennial women’s stories of mutual reliance and connection with parents, partners and friends to contrast assumptions of the individualizing, neoliberal, Gen Y worker. I use a feminist understanding of agency and autonomy to argue that young women’s stories about work are anything but individual experiences of flexibility or precarity – instead, I explain how relationships play a critical role in worker agency and whether work feels flexible or precarious. Overall I consider what a feminist theorizing of interdependence and precariousness offers geography, emphasizing the importance of subjectivity and relationality.
36-6 QUALITY OF LIFE
33-3521
Action theory. Biological analysis. Design. Distance.
Wonderful living things such as biological clocks, sensors, living cameras and switches are often presented as iconic designs in synthetic biology. The wonderfulness of such living things resides in their performative powers: they ‘count’, ‘memorise’ or ‘imprint’, and they do so by living. This paper explores design in synthetic biology. It follows a basic biological part, a BioBrick construction, situating it as an element of more complex socio-technical assemblages. The paper explores how living designs in synthetic biology are stabilized and given credit. Rather than producing static matters of fact, synthetic biology turns the dynamics of life itself into a matter of design. Arguably, living designs in synthetic biology displace the epistemic focus, moving its referential anchoring from ‘back’ in reality to ‘ahead’ in the future or from the natural organism to the possible living thing. A will to act at a distant time is inscribed in the living wonderful things of synthetic biology. The paper proposes a number of ways in which action is displaced towards the future within synthetic biology designs: as recursive innovation, potentiality, technological acceleration and anticipatory action. Matters of design in synthetic biology are justified on the premise that wished-for futures can be realized.
33-3522
Diffusion process. Health. Time.
The current epidemic of El Tor cholera in the Caribbean republic of Haiti is one of the largest single outbreaks of the disease ever recorded. The prospects are that the epidemic will continue to present challenges to workers in public health medicine, epidemiology, and allied fields in the social sciences for years to come. This article introduces geographers to the environmental context of the Haiti cholera epidemic, the principal data sources available to analyze the occurrence of the epidemic, and evidence regarding its geographical origins and dispersal during the first thirty months of the epidemic, October 2010 through March 2013. Using weekly case data collated by the Haitian Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population (MSPP), techniques of time series analysis are used to examine inter- and intradepartmental patterns of cholera activity. Our analysis demonstrates a pronounced lag structure to the spatial development of the epidemic (Artibonite and northern departments ? Ouest and metropolitan Port-au-Prince ? southern departments). Observed variations in levels of epidemiological integration, both within and between departments, provide new perspectives on the spatiotemporal evolution of the epidemic to its March 2013 pattern.