Abstract
HISTORY/THEORY/ADMINISTRATION
11. Concepts of Planning
11-1 APPROACHES (COMPREHENSIVE/STRATEGIC/COLLABORATIVE)
33-3724
Complexity theory. Food. Food industry. Methodology. Organizational capabilities.
Household food insecurity is the product of a wide range of environmental, social, and economic determinants, which themselves interact with and affect one another. On this point, though, much of the existing food security scholarship suffers from a lack of theoretical sophistication and tends to neglect the complex nature of the urban foodscape. This article develops an original systematic mixed method for understanding the determinants of food security, grounded in a new theoretical framework that integrates complex systems theory and the capability approach. Both theory and method have been developed by reference to a comparative empirical study of Afghan migrant communities in Sydney, London, and San Francisco. The efficacy of this (re)theorization and its accompanying system effects method are demonstrated by way of a worked example of their use in the case of the Sydney Afghan community.
33-3725
Asia. Knowledge. Landscape. Production.
Landscape is a key concept in geography, one that has been critically engaged with by geography’s subdisciplines using various conceptual and methodological approaches. Thus, landscape should be a key foundation with which to engage intradisciplinarity within geography. From a variety of strands within geography, however, the definitions that have emerged around landscape can still exclude a range of other voices and perspectives that can usefully contribute to, define, and reconstitute landscape. In this article, we present an argument from different perspectives about the limits of the landscape concept. We present two examples of the use of the landscape concept within physical and human geography, showing in both how the inclusion of other voices and spatial traditions is essential for more inclusive descriptions and provincializations of the concept itself. We argue that, ultimately, efforts to unlearn our strictly defined and bounded concept of landscape will allow us to engage radical difference in spatial terms. We also suggest that beyond just intradisciplinarity within geography, geographers should work hard to incorporate other voices, traditions of thought, and ecologies in and beyond the conceptual domain of landscape.
33-3726
Development of mapping abilities. Mapping techniques. Maps. Quantitative analysis.
This article reports on color usage in quantitative thematic mapping, drawing from an evaluation of maps published in eight geographical journals over the ten-year period from 2004 to 2013. During this period we found that color has become the preferred method to represent quantitative data sets, with the percentage of quantitative color maps relative to all quantitative maps rising from 18.4 percent in 2004 to 69.9 percent in 2013. We reviewed a sample of 440 maps from this period to assess the nature and appropriateness of their respective color schemes. We found the following frequencies of color scheme usage: spectral (30 percent), sequential (25.9 percent), diverging (25.7 percent), traffic (7.7 percent), and uncategorized (10.7 percent). Each scheme exhibited a distinct set of significant associations with particular map and data attributes, including subject matter, symbolization method, data polarity, and map size. Diverging and sequential schemes were the most effective, having strong associations with five key questions that we used to evaluate map effectiveness; for example, both schemes tended to be completely effective in terms of communicating spatial patterns and representing quantitative data values. Despite their popularity, spectral schemes were demonstrably unreliable and ineffective. Both spectral and traffic schemes were problematic for those with color vision deficiencies. Given the problems that we found with the use of various colors schemes, we make several suggestions for improving the design of maps appearing in refereed journals.
11-5 APPLICATIONS/TECHNIQUES
33-3727
Geographical models. Scales. Spatial analysis.
Scale is a fundamental geographic concept, and a substantial literature exists discussing the various roles that scale plays in different geographical contexts. Relatively little work exists, though, that provides a means of measuring the geographic scale over which different processes operate. Here we demonstrate how geographically weighted regression (GWR) can be adapted to provide such measures. GWR explores the potential spatial nonstationarity of relationships and provides a measure of the spatial scale at which processes operate through the determination of an optimal bandwidth. Classical GWR assumes that all of the processes being modeled operate at the same spatial scale, however. The work here relaxes this assumption by allowing different processes to operate at different spatial scales. This is achieved by deriving an optimal bandwidth vector in which each element indicates the spatial scale at which a particular process takes place. This new version of GWR is termed multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR), which is similar in intent to Bayesian nonseparable spatially varying coefficients (SVC) models, although potentially providing a more flexible and scalable framework in which to examine multiscale processes. Model calibration and bandwidth vector selection in MGWR are conducted using a back-fitting algorithm. We compare the performance of GWR and MGWR by applying both frameworks to two simulated data sets with known properties and to an empirical data set on Irish famine. Results indicate that MGWR not only is superior in replicating parameter surfaces with different levels of spatial heterogeneity but provides valuable information on the scale at which different processes operate.
33-3728
Cellular automata. Globalization. Land use changes.
Global land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) data are crucial for modeling a wide range of environmental conditions. So far, access to high-resolution LUCC products at a global scale for public use is difficult because of data and technical issues. This article presents a Future Land-Use Simulation (FLUS) system to simulate global LUCC in relation to human–environment interactions, which is built and verified by using remote sensing data. IMAGE has been widely used in environmental studies despite its relatively coarse spatial resolution of 30 arc-min, which is about 55 km at the equator. Recently, an improved model has been developed to simulate global LUCC with a 5-min resolution (about 10 km at the equator). We found that even the 10-km resolution, however, still produced major distortions in land-use patterns, leading urban land areas to be underestimated by 19.77 percent at the global scale and global land change relating to urban growth to be underestimated by 60 to 97 percent, compared with the 1-km resolution model proposed through this article. These distortions occurred because a large percentage of small areas of urban land was merged into other land-use classes. During land-use change simulation, a majority of small urban clusters were also lost using the IMAGE product. Responding to these deficiencies, the 1-km FLUS product developed in this study is able to provide the spatial detail necessary to identify spatial heterogeneous land-use patterns at a global scale. We argue that this new global land-use product has strong potential in radically reducing uncertainty in global environmental modeling.
11-7 CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
33-3729
Scales. Spatial analysis. United States. Voting.
Much has been written in recent years about the claimed polarization of the U.S. electorate, with substantial differences as to whether there has been greater spatial polarization, at several geographical scales, over recent decades. To assess the veracity of those alternative views, a bespoke data set showing percentage support for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates at the county, state, and divisional scales has been analyzed using a robust, statistically based measure of polarization and segregation. The ecological results provide clear and compelling evidence of a trend toward greater polarization across the nine census divisions, across the forty-nine states within those divisions, and across the 3,077 counties within the states—with strong evidence that the differences over time at the last of those scales are highly statistically significant. Within those general trends, polarization has been greater in some states than others and also within some states more than others—identifying additional geographies calling for further research.
33-3730
Citizen participation. Citizenship. Geographic information systems. Web-based planning.
The emergence of Web 2.0, open source software tools, and geosocial networks, along with associated mobile devices and available government data, is widely considered to have altered the nature and processes of place-based digital participation. Considerable theorizing has been dedicated to the geographic version of Web 2.0, the geospatial Web (Geoweb). To assess the theories, we draw on four years of empirical work across Canada that considers the nature of public participation on the Geoweb. We are driven by the question of how easy or difficult it is to “do” Geoweb-enabled participation, particularly participation as envisioned by researchers such as Arnstein and planning practitioners. We consider how the Geoweb could transform methods by which citizens and nonprofit organizations communicate with the state on environmental issues that affect their lives. We conduct a meta-analysis of twelve research cases and derive new findings that reach across the cases on how the Geoweb obliges us to redefine and unitize participation. This redefinition reifies existing digital inequalities, blurs distinctions between experts and nonexperts, heterogenizes the state as an actor in the participation process, reassigns participation activities in a participation hierarchy, and distances participation from channels of influence.
12. Policy and Planning Administration
12-4 POLICY ANALYSIS
33-3731
Built environment. Governance. Implementation. Policy. Policy design. Public policy.
Policy predictions fail for the very many different kinds of case-by-case local factors described in the Building Research & Information (2015) special issue (vol. 43/4) entitled ‘Closing the Policy Gaps: From Formulation to Outcomes’. Work in philosophy of science shows that beyond the case by case, general systematic problems loom that make the gap between theory and practice hard to close. What is needed in response, it is argued here, are ways to cope with the gap and to build an expectation about it into planning predictions, into planning decisions, into the methods of implementing and monitoring, as well as into fallback and failsafe plans. Tracking implementation and outcomes is not only useful for post hoc evaluation but also a powerful tool for getting the intended outcomes in the first place and making the necessary adjustments.
33-3732
Built environment. Comparative analysis. Governance. Policy. Policy making. Research. Urban development.
This commentary considers the Building Research & Information special issue (volume 43/4) entitled ‘Closing the Policy Gaps: From Formulation to Outcomes’. Although the call for papers received an international response, the special issue has a focus on cases of policy-making and outcomes in the UK. A critical review is presented addressing several questions for the international research, consultancy and policy-making communities. What can these international communities learn from the presented examples? How do variations in governance regimes and structures influence policy formulation and outcomes, particularly the reduction in policy ‘gaps’? What future steps could be taken to produce more internationally oriented comparative research on policy-making and implementation regarding the built environment and urban–regional development? How can evidence and analysis be used to build theory? Do the research and consultancy communities need to improve their policy literacy? What lessons can the research community, in particular, learn from this process in advising on policy formation and implementation processes?
12-5 POLITICS AND PLANNING
33-3733
Europe. Leadership. Place. Population. Spatial analysis.
Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge across electoral democracies from movements and candidates that claim they are “going to the people” directly for their support. Italy has been a laboratory for this populism even as the term itself is used more widely. The basic question of what the people are to whom populism refers has not received much, if any, empirical examination. After surveying usage of the term populism, three facets behind the rise of Italian populism since 1990 are examined using a geographic perspective. First, the geography of voter turnout and rising abstention is considered to be emblematic of dissatisfaction with existing parties and the expanding pool of nonvoters available for mobilization by populist movements and candidates. Second, the role of the leader as an alternative focal point to the party is shown to be central to such populist movements. Silvio Berlusconi is the primary actor in this account, although other similar figures are identified. Third and finally, the rise of the Internet-based 5 Star Movement and the promise of going to the people without any institutional or geographical mediation is assessed. The Movement’s dual identity as having strong roots in some places as a civic organization and a remarkably uneven geography as a protest movement shows how much even it cannot engage with a singular people. When examined closely, the promise of politics without mediation made by populist movements proves beyond realization.
33-3734
Animals. Decision making. Democracy. Governance.
Contemporary governance systems have been characterised as ‘multi-actor’ and ‘multi-level’, but the consequences of such greater complexity for core principles of democracy remain uncertain. To investigate the effects of these late-modern governance shifts, we used political decision making on Scottish reintroductions of charismatic animals as a case study. Based on interviews with key actors engaged in the reintroduction of the white-tailed eagle, beaver and (potentially) lynx, we analysed the impact of governance shifts against four selected democratic principles. We found that new modes of governance can make decision-making processes look better than they actually are, and may even harm democratic principles.
33-3735
Politics. Refugees. Sovereignty.
This article traces a genealogy of sovereignty and exception in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that highlights their mutual connections and contaminations with the mechanisms of Lebanese state sovereignty from 1948 onward. Drawing together two theoretical approaches emerging from the work of Giorgio Agamben and recent political geographical work on sovereignty, we explore the refugee camps as spaces of exception characterized by hybrid sovereignties. Drawing on original fieldwork, we trace the evolution of the relationship of exception and its mutual links with the production of hybridity in Lebanon’s sovereignty from 1948 until today, focusing particularly on the key period from 1968 to 1982 when Palestinian militancy led to a formal recognition of Palestinian autonomy in the camps. Rather than simply undermining Lebanon’s sovereignty, the camps’ fragmented security and territoriality have instead reshaped Lebanon’s state sovereignty in complex ways and forged hybrid spaces for refugee political agency to emerge.
13. Planning Law and Legislation
13-2 LAND USE CONTROLS
33-3736
Geographic information systems. History. Land use. United States. Urban history. Zoning.
Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did U.S. city governments turn to comprehensive zoning to gain control of their land use and built environment. Nineteenth-century cities had comparatively unregulated land-use systems, where proprietors and builders found minimal restrictions to their choices to develop urban land. This article exploits newly digitized geographic information systems (GIS) data, at the level of building footprints, made available by the New York Public Library, to study the land-use geography of mid-nineteenth-century Manhattan, the Western world’s then third largest city. We ask: What was the spatial order of the nineteenth-century city? Beyond the case, what can we learn about land use in a political economy where market forces operated with much greater freedom? Addressing these issues, we introduce a variety of advanced GIS methods to the original data set. Specifically, we examine the separation and mixing of the three basic land-use types of commerce, industry, and residence, by the spatial units of both blocks and streets. In addition, we measure at a new level of precision the enormous variations in residential density and crowding that defined the growing sociospatial inequalities of nineteenth-century cities. Documenting systematically and in detail these spatial patterns, including their socially undesirable outcomes, helps understand how nineteenth-century cities developed and the conditions they produced to warrant increasing land-use controls, from building codes to government-mandated zoning.
33-3737
Capital. Consumption. Globalization. Land use. Space.
Globalization entwines human lives with distant fields and forests. In response, our approach to land is relational yet also computational. We calculate and map intricate connections among land uses and distant populations mediated by both commodity chains and capital, thereby unpacking, deepening, extending, and pluralizing recent methods estimating land footprints of commodity consumption. After constructing networks of approximately 130 million direct connections among land uses, economic activities, and peoples of the world in 2007, we trace infinities of indirect interconnections. Dominant absolute-space approaches to human–environment relations facilitate local comparisons of population and resources, but our relational quantitative approach provides maps and metrics that illustrate how uneven development under neoliberal globalization results in strong global net redistributions of various per capita benefits from land use, especially from Global South to Global North. From the perspective of capital investment, the median square meter of global land use contributes to futures of human populations outside, not inside, of the country of that land. Many connections to land reach us in the form of manufactured goods and services, not just through food and fibers. Our conclusions require simultaneous examination of the indirect interconnections of all commodities, activities, and places; our characterizations of land and globalization thus differ from the forms of evidence used in studies examining single commodity chains or offered by direct trade statistics, although the results are often complementary. We show that geographical political economy and relational quantitative approaches to space have much to offer understandings of land in the Anthropocene.
33-3738
Capital accumulation. Colonialism. Corruption. Discourse. Dispossession. Informal sector. Land. Urbanism.
In this age of global inequality, how people talk of corruption matters. This article examines the role of corruption narratives in struggles against land enclosures (“land grabs”) in two Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic research on land grabs in Mumbai and Bangalore and critical corruption and geography literatures, we argue that corruption talk by slum-based and lower middle-class residents and activists advances an ethical critique of contemporary capitalism. In our cases, corruption discourse upends mainstream development agendas that narrowly equate corruption with individual acts of bribery and the long-standing notion in India that corruption manifests mainly among the poor and lower rungs of the state. Instead, we find that “corruption” serves as a cultural, semantic, and moral rubric that expresses and shapes a sense of structural injustice in this moment of sharpening urban inequality. Specifically, corruption talk is leveraged to identify and challenge the mechanisms underlying elite land grabs and the hypocritical policing of the poor. Corruption discourse also provides a meaningful framework to voice discontent over the betrayal of the “public interest”—defined here as housing and economic dispossession. Taking care not to unequivocally celebrate its progressive potential, we find that corruption discourse can be and has been repurposed in disruptive ways. We therefore posit the need to examine how corruption politics are expanding—rather than disappearing—from geographies of advanced capitalism.
33-3739
Agricultural land use. Geographic information systems. Remote sensing. Urban areas. Urban development.
Based on constraining the spatial extent of urban expansion, the urban development boundary concept provides guidance on resource constraints and policy development for urban areas and aims to meet the new demands of urban development under the background of a new type of urbanization in China. We applied remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) techniques, along with the slope, land use, exclusion, urban extent, transportation, and hill shade (SLEUTH) model, to identify urban growth boundaries in Changzhou City, China. We then comprehensively considered various land use regulation policies and the carrying capacity of land resources to construct an urban development boundary model. This model was tested using empirical data on the delineation of flexible and rigid urban development boundaries. We argue that China’s position as the largest developing country in the world has resulted in significant uncertainties in its socioeconomic development; therefore, the construction of Chinese cities requires both flexible controls and a rigid management structure. The model developed in this study successfully meets the construction needs of China’s urban development, particularly as it contains an optimal degree of generalizability.
33-3740
Evolution. Landscape. Reconstruction.
Pediments of the Sonoran Desert in the United States have intrigued physical geographers and geomorphologists for nearly a century. These gently sloping bedrock landforms are a staple of the desert landscape that millions visit each year. Despite the long-lived scientific curiosity, an understanding of the processes operating on the pediment has remained elusive. In this study we revisit the extensive history of pediment research. We then apply geospatial, field, and laboratory cosmogenic 10Be nuclide dating and back-scattered electron microscopy methods to assess the pace and processes of landscape change on pediment systems abutting the Salt River in Arizona. Our study focuses on the Usery pediments linked to base-level fluctuations (river terraces) of the Salt River. Relict pediment surfaces were reconstructed with dGPS data and kriging methodologies utilized in ArcGIS—based on preserved evidence of ancient pediment surfaces. 10Be ages of Salt River terraces established a chronology of incision events, where calculating the volume between the reconstructed relict pediment and modern surface topography established minimum erosion rates (∼41 mm/ka to ∼415 mm/ka). Pediment area and length appear to have a positive correlation to erosion rate and development of planar pediment surfaces. Field and laboratory observations reveal that pediment systems adjust and stabilize at each Salt River terrace. Relief reduction across the pediment begins with pediment channel incision via headward erosion. Next, tributary drainage capture begins and collapses interfluves. Lateral stream erosion promotes planation where the porosity of decayed granite along channel banks exceeds the bedrock underneath ephemeral channels.
14. Planning and Society
14-1 POVERTY
33-3741
Food. Food production. Poverty. Urbanization.
Food deserts have been widely studied in Western contexts but rarely in transitioning economies and never within a rainforest. The Brazilian Amazon is a rapidly urbanizing region with high levels of poverty and food insecurity, providing an ideal context in which to explore this current research gap. Within this setting, five urban centers ranging from small town to metropole are examined to explore any potential variations between urban centers of different sizes and settings. A large survey was conducted with interviews in 554 food shops, assessing shop characteristics, food availability, price, and alternative household food acquisition strategies. Methods were developed to explore food deserts, accounting for food acquisition across multiple shops within a neighborhood. Insufficient access to healthy food was estimated to be widespread (42 percent of households), with access worse in smaller towns. Unlike many previous studies, local access to healthy food was not linked to neighborhood poverty and prices were generally lower in poorer areas. High levels of nonretail sourcing of food (e.g., fruit trees, fishing) in this region might lead to an overestimation of the food access problem if only retail food provision were considered. We conclude that food deserts are widespread in the rainforest cities studied, yet we highlight the importance of understanding local retail and nonretail food contexts. Finally, we question the extent to which the traditional food desert concept can be directly applied in the context of transitioning economies.
33-3742
Poverty. Segregation. Suburbanization. Urban areas.
In this article we argue that the recent focus on the suburbanization of poverty is problematic because of the ambiguities and inconsistencies in defining suburbia. To improve transparency, replicability, and comparability, we suggest that research on the geographical changes to the distribution of poverty should focus on three questions: (1) How centralized is urban poverty? (2) To what extent is it decentralizing? (3) Is it becoming spatially dispersed? With respect to all three questions, the issue of quantifying uncertainty has been underresearched. The main contribution of the article is to provide a practical and robust solution to the problem of inference based on a Bayesian multivariate conditional autoregressive (CAR) model, made accessible via the R software package CARBayes. Our approach can be applied to spatiotemporally autocorrelated data and can estimate both levels of and change in global relative centralization index (RCI), local RCIs, and dissimilarity indexes. We illustrate our method with an application to Scotland’s four largest cities. Our results show that poverty was centralized in 2011 in Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen. Poverty in Edinburgh, however, was decentralized: Nonpoor households tend to live closer to the center than poor ones and increasingly so. We also find evidence of statistically significant reductions in centralization of poverty in all four cities. To test whether this change is associated with poverty becoming more dispersed, we estimate changes to evenness and local decentralization of poverty, revealing complex patterns of change.
14-2 DISCRIMINATION/DESEGREGATION/INTEGRATION
33-3743
Children. Demographics. Geographic information systems. Health. History. Mortality. Multilevel models. Segregation.
Across many cities in the early twentieth century, one in five children died before their fifth birthday. There is much we do not know about how infant and child mortality was reduced or why it declined at different rates across populations. This article investigates mortality using data from 13,247 families in Dublin City in the 1900s with a novel approach that incorporates geographic information systems, spatially derived predictors, and multilevel modeling. In the early twentieth century, Dublin had one of the highest early-age mortality rates in the British Empire. Whereas experts attributed the death of young children to the unhygienic behaviors of indigenous Roman Catholics, others made claims of a social injustice rooted in economic inequality and the indifference of public authorities toward the health of the lower classes. This article finds that high Catholic mortality was mainly driven by poverty and the conditions engendered by residential segregation. Low mortality rates among Dublin’s small Jewish population are not easily explained by location or economic characteristics.
33-3744
Clustering. Clusters. Race. Segregation.
One problem encountered in analyses based on data aggregated into areal units is that the results can depend on the delineation of the areal units. Therefore, a particular aggregation at a specific scale can yield an arbitrary result that is valid only for that specific delineation. This problem is called the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), and it has previously been shown to create issues in analyses of clusters and segregation patterns. Many analyses of segregation and clustering use the ratio or difference between a value for an areal unit and the corresponding value for a larger area of reference. We argue that the results of such an analysis can also be rendered arbitrary if one does not examine the effects of varying the geographical extent of the area of reference to test whether the analysis results are valid for more than a specific areal delineation. We call this the part of the MAUP that is related to the area of reference. In this article, we present and demonstrate a multiscalar approach for studying segregation and clustering that avoids the MAUP, including the part of the problem related to the area of reference. The proposed methods rely on multiscalar aggregation of the k nearest neighbors of a location in a statistical comparison with a larger area of reference consisting of the K nearest neighbors. The methods are exemplified by identifying clusters and segregation patterns of the Hispanic population in the contiguous United States.
33-3745
Civil rights. Colonialism. International planning.
This article charts the trip made by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin to West Africa in 1952 and examines the unpublished Africa Program that he subsequently presented to leading U.S. pacifists. I situate Rustin’s writings within the burgeoning literature on black internationalism that, despite its clear geographical registers, geographers themselves have as yet made only a modest contribution toward. The article argues that within this literature there remains a tendency to romanticize cross-cultural connections in lieu of critically interrogating their basic, and often competing, claims. I argue that closer attention to the geographies of black internationalism, however, allows us to shape a more diverse and practiced sense of internationalist encounter and exchange. The article reconstructs the multiplicity of Rustin’s black internationalist geographies that drew eclectically from a range of pan-African, American, and pacifist traditions. Although each of these was profoundly racialized, each conceptualized race in distinctive ways and thereby had differing understandings of what constituted the international as a geographical arena. By blending these forms of internationalism, Rustin was able to promote a particular model of civil rights that was characteristically internationalist in outlook, nonviolent in principle, and institutional in composition, a model that in selective and uneven ways continues to shape our understanding of the period.
33-3747
Geopolitics. Identity. Race. Religion.
Exploring both debates about misrecognition and explorations of encounters, this article focuses on the experiences of ethnic and religious minority young people who are mistaken for being Muslim in Scotland. We explore experiences of encountering misrecognition, including young people’s understandings of, and responses to, such encounters. Recognizing how racism and religious discrimination operate to marginalize people—and how people manage and respond to this—is crucial in the struggle for social justice. Our focus is on young people from a diversity of ethnic and religious minority groups who are growing up in urban, suburban, and rural Scotland, 382 of whom participated in forty-five focus groups and 224 interviews. We found that young Sikhs, Hindus, and other south Asian young people as well as black and Caribbean young people were regularly mistaken for being Muslim. These encounters tended to take place at school, in taxis, at the airport, and in public spaces. Our analysis points to a dynamic set of interconnected issues shaping young people’s experiences of misrecognition across a range of mediatized, geopoliticized, and educational spaces. Geopolitical events and their representation in the media, the homogenization of the south “Asian” community, and the lack of visibility offered to non-Muslim ethnic and religious minority groups all worked to construct our participants as “Muslims.” Young people demonstrated agency and creativity in handling and responding to these encounters, including using humor, clarifying their religious affiliation, social withdrawal, and ignoring the situation. Redressing misrecognition requires institutional change to ensure parity of participation in society.
14-4 URBAN SOCIOLOGY
33-3748
Action theory. Adaptation. Housing. Informal sector. Participation. Urban regeneration.
Significant lessons can be drawn from grassroots’ experiences of self-organizing to challenge the uneven distribution of resources and opportunities in cities. This paper examines the strategies of low-income dwellers living in squatted buildings in São Paulo, Brazil, and asks how resilience narratives can help one understand the agency of these micro-strategies across multiple scales. The city centre of São Paulo is a key site for housing movements to challenge spatial injustice in Brazil. In a context where housing for low-income groups is in short supply and characterized by highly skewed social and spatial distribution, squatted buildings have emerged since the 1990s as laboratories for alternative ways of producing the city. The paper draws from an action-research project investigating such occupations in São Paulo. Firstly, it explores the practices of individual and groups inhabiting a building known as Ocupação Marconi, focusing on its social production as a device for co-producing local resilience from the micro-scale. Secondly, it reflects on which forms of knowledge production might allow for putting such practices into focus, interrogating participatory action research as a means to facilitate resilience at scale.
33-3749
Adaptive behavior. Agriculture. Development. Farmers. Resources. Urban areas.
This paper describes the adaptation of agricultural management practices due to structural changes in the urban periphery of Hyderabad, India. We investigate structural-change drivers along with the most common types of adaptation realised by peri-urban farmers and the corresponding environmental impacts. From 120 farmer interviews, in which qualitative and quantitative data were collected, we found that increasing costs for agricultural inputs such as labour and land have motivated farmers to intensify water, machine and chemical use, thereby creating problematic environmental impacts. In addition, farmers also resort to part-time farming and organise efforts to share family labour. Based on these findings, we discuss agricultural policies and strategies within the framework of environmental planning and management for the Greater Hyderabad Area (GHA), drawing policy-design conclusions that may enable better integration of farming into the on-going process of megacity development.
14-6 CRIME/DELINQUENCY
33-3750
Crime. Drug trafficking. Geographic information systems. Spatial analysis.
New geographic approaches are required to tease apart the underlying sociospatial complexity of neighborhood decline to target appropriate interventions. Typically maps of crime hotspots are used with relatively little attention being paid to geographic context. This article helps further this discourse using a topical study of a neighborhood drug microspace, a phrase we use to include the various stages of production, selling, acquiring, and taking, to show how context matters. We overlay an exploratory data analysis of three cohort spatial video geonarratives (SVGs) to contextualize the traditional crime rate hotspot maps. Using two local area analyses of police, community, and ex-offender SVGs and then comparing these with police call for service data, we identify spaces of commonality and difference across data types. In the Discussion, we change the scale to consider revealed microspaces and the interaction of both “good” and “bad” places. We enrich the previous analysis with a mapped spatial video assessment of the built environment and then return to the narrative to extract additional detail around a crime-associated corner store next to a community center. Our findings suggest that researchers should reevaluate how to enrich typical hotspot approaches with more on-the-ground context.
33-3751
Crime. Population. Spatial analysis.
Residential population data are frequently employed to link the crime incidence of an area with the number of residents to estimate the underlying risk. Human mobility patterns cause shifts in the baseline population, however, that can potentially influence the crime statistics. This study therefore employed an ambient population that combined residential population data with data depicting the commuting activity in small administrative areas. The effects of the commuter-harmonized ambient population on crime were then evaluated in a series of negative binomial regression models. The models also controlled for criminogenic factors and incorporated eigenvector spatial filtering to adjust for spatial effects. The results show significant effects of commuting patterns on crime outcomes. For certain crimes, such as violence, theft, and disorder, the inbound commuters are significantly associated with high risk. It was further discovered that an offset variable comprising the commuter-harmonized ambient population data models the crime outcomes more reliably than when residential population data are used. Spatial filtering was found to effectively eradicate residual spatial autocorrelation after accounting for effects of the predictor variables. We conclude that calculating crime rates using the residential population does not constitute an accurate risk measure and that the ambient population has crucial implications for realistic and reliable target representation and crime modeling.
33-3752
Asia. Human activity. Resistance. Space.
Spaces of human trafficking can be perceived as “total,” akin to those of the prison and the detention center, because of the intense surveillance, bodily compliance through discipline, removal of freedom, and restricted mobility they create. Although Foucault’s panopticon and Goffman’s related concept of the total institution have some merit in conceptualizing these situations, geographical scholarship on institutions and regimes of incarceration has advanced important critiques of prisons as total institutions, arguing among other things for the potential of incarcerated subjects to resist and express agency. Drawing on de Certeau, these arguments focus on agency that is expressed through manipulating and subverting the disciplining gaze of power in highly embodied ways. This article examines these everyday expressions of agency in the context of bars and clubs located around U.S. military bases in South Korea, where many of the female migrant laborers are trafficked entertainers. Despite the growing scholarly engagement with human trafficking, comparatively little research attends to everyday resistance and agency in such situations or what spaces of human trafficking might tell us about the nature and geography of incarceration. In response, this article advances a perspective that centers on shadow play in everyday spaces of incarceration to illuminate the operations of resistance and agency in situations of human trafficking. It also draws attention to some of the limits in understanding resistance in such situations through the models and practices of labor activism derived through a consideration of ostensibly free laborers.
14-7 HEALTH/EDUCATION/SOCIAL SERVICES
33-3753
Americans With Disabilities Act. Disabilities. Geography. Health. Physical disabilities. Rural areas. Social theory.
This article examines the discursive and material practices of rural masculinity in Southeast Kansas by foregrounding ability and place as essential in understanding gender. It draws on empirical data gathered from autoethnographic participant-observer research conducted in the region. I begin with a synopsis of critical studies on masculinity in the field of human geography and proceed by offering a summary of research specifically addressing rural masculinities. I then illustrate contrasting perspectives surrounding dis/ability as a concept and also provide an in-depth overview of crip theory. I next describe the research context and methods utilized during the project, as well as how men use their bodies as conduits through which cultural norms pertaining to “manhood” are expressed, affirmed, and reproduced. My results demonstrate how situated assertions of masculinity are inextricably linked to ability, (hetero)sexuality, and sociospatial context, as well as how the pervasive yet veiled pressures of heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness impose banal and strictly policed social boundaries in regard to belonging and inclusion. The piece is thus a “cripping” of hegemonic notions of manhood in rural Southeast Kansas suggesting that both ability and place are necessary constituent elements for any critical analysis of masculinity.
33-3754
Aging. Aging and retirement. Health. Neighborhood planning. Neighborhoods. Network analysis. Urban environments.
Aging in place can be a challenge for seniors living in cities, where the infrastructure and associated services are typically designed for the working population to enhance efficiency and productivity. Through surveying community-dwelling seniors, we ask these research questions: How is the neighborhood environment related to the physical and mental health of seniors living in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo? How can we make cities more age-friendly to encourage aging in place? To answer these research questions, both observational and questionnaire surveys are used. Characteristics of the local neighborhood are captured by individual-based and general local characteristics. Multilevel analysis is used to disentangle the effects of factors operating at different spatial scales. A total of 687 seniors aged sixty-five and older living in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo in eleven residential neighborhood districts were recruited through local senior community centers. Based on the final models, 17.53 percent and 8.24 percent of the variance in the physical and mental health scores is across general neighborhoods, respectively, and the remaining is at the individual level, including individual-based neighborhood factors. Biological factors are not the most important. Instead, having a normal range of weight and the proper use of a walking aid can allow seniors, even of the oldest-old group of eighty-five and older, to be more active. Policy-wise, neighborhood factors should be carefully planned to promote seniors’ health directly through enhancing walkability and fostering supportive peer groups and indirectly through encouraging a more active lifestyle. Promoting a walkable urban environment should be a priority area for supporting aging in place in cities.
33-3755
Asia. Consumption. Ecology.
Infectious diseases associated with dams in many parts of the world suggest a strong possibility of similar occurrence in Southeast Asia, but little is known about the influences of dams on disease occurrences in Southeast Asia, where a wide range of water-related diseases are present. An important public health issue in Southeast Asia is opisthorchiasis, the infection from liver fluke spread by ingesting raw or undercooked freshwater fish. This study investigated the effects of the Ubolratana reservoir in Thailand on Opisthorchis viverrini infection through the analyses of fish species assemblage and fish host infection in the reservoir and rivers, human fish consumption behavior, and their interactions. Multivariate analyses for community ecology and surveys of human practices were used to examine human–environment interactions involved in O. viverrini transmission. The results showed that the reservoir and the rivers harbored different fish species of varied O. viverrini infection densities, with the reservoir having higher overall infection rates than the rivers. Although the preferred species for raw fish dishes was found with low infection, several high-infection species were commonly consumed. The reservoir might have implications for opisthorchiasis risk through the potential change of fish species assemblage and the supply of high O. viverrini–infected fish to most of the villages around it. This study underscored the need to consider human–environment interactions for understanding the risks of disease transmission.
14-8 PLANNING AND GENDER/RACE/ETHNICITY
33-3756
Air pollution. Environmental justice. Gender. Gender differences. Health. Sexuality.
Disparate residential hazard exposures based on disadvantaged gender status (e.g., among female-headed households) have been documented in the distributive environmental justice literature, yet no published studies have examined whether disproportionate environmental risks exist based on minority sexual orientation. To address this gap, we use data from the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and the Environmental Protection Agency at the 2010 census tract level to examine the spatial relationships between same-sex partner households and cumulative cancer risk from exposure to hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) emitted by all ambient emission sources in Greater Houston (Texas). Findings from generalized estimating equation analyses demonstrate that increased cancer risks from HAPs are significantly associated with neighborhoods having relatively high concentrations of resident same-sex partner households, adjusting for geographic clustering and variables known to influence risk (i.e., race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, renter status, income inequality, and population density). HAP exposures are distributed differently, however, for same-sex male versus same-sex female partner households. Neighborhoods with relatively high proportions of same-sex male partner households are associated with significantly greater exposure to cancer-causing HAPs, whereas those with high proportions of same-sex female partner households are associated with less exposure. This study provides initial empirical documentation of a previously unstudied pattern and infuses current theoretical understanding of environmental inequality formation with knowledge emanating from the sexualities and space literature. Practically, results suggest that other documented health risks experienced in gay neighborhoods could be compounded by disparate health risks associated with harmful exposures to air toxics.
33-3757
Gender. Geography. History. Race. United States.
Through a case study of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s interventions into the lives of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in early twentieth-century Alabama, I show how gendered and racialized norms of family and family life were used to keep African American farmers tied to the land, thus uncovering a relatively unexamined geography of containment. At stake for the U.S. government, local and regional leaders, and cotton plantation owners were the extremely large profits generated by dominance of the global cotton market, profits made possible only from the labor of indebted African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers. I document, in other words, how a new technology of racial governance, of keeping people in place, was developed and articulated to maintain U.S. economic power. By doing so, I highlight the importance of understanding the interrelated historical geographies of race, gender, and place in the United States, thus demonstrating the contemporary significance of a critical historical geography.
33-3758
Collectivism. Gender. Social exclusion. Value orientations. Values.
Shea butter, derived from the African shea tree, has acquired a pivotal position in global agro-food and cosmetics industries. In Burkina Faso, public and private actors as well as civil society are converging upon the product to boost the incomes of rural female producers. As a result of these trends, the shea value chain is increasingly segmented; shea nuts are sold in a low-return, conventional market and simultaneously enter an alternative, high-value niche market. In the latter strand of the value chain, some producers are improving their prospects by forming an association. Tracing relationships across the two strands, we demonstrate how ‘horizontal’ relations based on gender, ethnicity, age and geography contribute to shaping participation and benefit capture in the shea value chain. We argue that processes of social inclusion and exclusion operate in parallel, as differentiated actors both cooperate and compete to secure their place within the chain. While collective organizing brings positive social and economic benefits, we show that producers’ associations need not be empowering for all women. The significance of collective enterprises, but also their drawbacks must be considered when valorising pathways to women’s empowerment. Our study reinforces calls for greater integration of horizontal elements in value chain analyses.
33-3759
Africa. Gender. Gender differences. Gender gap. Labor markets. Long-term care. Work.
Although female labor force participation is rising across the world, men’s share of unpaid care work has not increased commensurately. Why has there been a major change in one domain of gender relations yet marked continuity in another? This article tries to answer this question by doing three slightly unusual things. It uses the same theoretical concepts (exposure and interests) to analyze change and continuity across different domains of gender relations. It examines long-term processes of social change through ethnographic (rather than social survey) data from Zambia. Additionally, it explores commonalities in the Global North and South—thereby bringing together silos of knowledge. The argument is that flexibility in gender divisions of labor increases when there is a shift in both interests and exposure. This has occurred in the case of paid work: A decline in men’s incomes and job security has led many to regard women’s employment as advantageous. The resulting critical mass of women performing socially valued, masculine roles seems to have undermined gender ideologies, relating to competence and status—fostering a positive feedback loop. Few people are exposed to men sharing care work, however, as this mostly occurs in private spaces. Accordingly, many assume that such practices are neither common nor socially accepted. These norm perceptions furnish men with self-interested reasons to shun housework. These micro- and macrolevel interactions perpetuate asymmetric flexibility in gender divisions of labor.
33-3760
Infrastructure. Power. Power plants. Race. United States.
Some scholars have recently put forward the concept of energopower—the harnessing of electricity and fuel—as a way to rethink the energetic basis of biopower. In this article, I refine this idea by tracing the use of race in rural electrification planning in North Carolina during the New Deal 1930s. Drawing on archival fieldwork that examines and reconstructs the 1934 North Carolina Rural Electrification Survey, I chart the ways in which race was used to readjust and reshape projections of electricity consumption and the planning of electricity distribution line construction. This is particularly clear in the use of a metric called the correction factor that allowed electricity planners to negotiate the contradictions between the materiality of networked electricity service, based on connections, and the prevailing attitudes toward race, which were built around disconnection. Although the overall influence of the 1934 Survey on the location of electricity distribution in North Carolina remains an open question, this work highlights the ways an energopolitical project—rural electrification—intersects with a key biopolitical technology—state racism, thus providing a better understanding of the relationship between energy and social power.
33-3761
Geopolitics. Nationalism. Urbanism.
What are the roles of history and memory in geopolitics? How does urban experience influence geopolitical understandings of one’s place in the world? This article brings these questions to a study of how Ottoman Turkish citizens of Istanbul came to link ethnicity with nationalism and to view their Greek Orthodox neighbors as national betrayers. I propose an explicitly cultural geopolitics: an affective, embodied critical geopolitics contextually dependent on experience, encounter, and memory in place. My sources are postwar Ottoman humor gazettes published in Istanbul, the waning capital of the Ottoman Empire, while it was occupied by Allied forces immediately after World War I. The future sovereignty of the city was unknown, and there was no coherent state structure. As normative (and also subversive) popular media, humor gazettes illustrate the reverberation of postwar geopolitics with the lived and remembered processes of urban place. Ethno-nationalist Turkish belonging in Istanbul was a form of urbanism, composed of place-based norms for behavior and a commonly understood cultural geography of the city. Satirical depictions of urban Turkish and Greek encounters during the armistice era betray a Turkish anxiety surrounding territorial and historical claims to the city and also a simultaneous questioning and hardening of the imagined geographies that demarcated Turkish and Greek identities as nationally distinct. This research illuminates the topological and relational dimensions of ethno-nationalist identity formation and the role of urban cultural processes in political belonging in the contemporary Middle East.
15. Development Planning
15-1 COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT
33-3762
Built environment. Collective action. Community. Cooperative planning. Governance. Housing. Planning agency. Spatial analysis.
Collective action is a community resource crucial to ensure the resilience of communities. However, maintaining cooperation over time is also a significant challenge. Arguing that a major, though neglected, precondition for community resilience is sustained cooperation, this paper analyses the conditions triggering collective action in collective housing communities. Particular attention is paid to micro-level pathways through which characteristics of the common courtyard and the related rules for its use play for the maintenance or decay of collective action. The contours of an integrated theory of sustained cooperation is sketched. Drawing on Goal Framing (GF) theory and Common Pool Resource (CPR) theory, it is argued that CPR management institutions can only be effective in a community in which a normative goal frame is salient. Empirical material is presented from a multi-method comparative case study of four low-income urban collective housing communities in Mexico City in 2010. This evidence corroborates both approaches: the two communities characterized by sustained collective action exhibit a salient normative frame in combination with all elements of CPR managing institutions, whereas the two communities with failed collective action do not meet these conditions. The results suggest that both mechanisms are necessary for sustained cooperation to occur.
33-3763
Built environment. Collaboration. Design. Housing. Neighborhood planning. Participation. Planning agency. Urban policy.
In the debate on neighbourhood resilience, there is a demand for co-production involving inhabitants in adaptation processes. Neighbourhood resilience is discussed in terms of economic, ecological and socio-political capacities, making place–people relations a key factor. Academia-led research-by-design projects are engaging in resilience-building, but professional roles are still unclear. Architects, planners and urban designers often have limited knowledge about the specific community and the socio-economic impacts of their projects. This especially occurs in modernist mass-housing settlements within current conditions of neo-liberalization. Here, inhabitants and designers have only limited access to decision-making power and resources. More significantly, the spatial improvements might endanger major resources: the social cohesion and affordability of the neighbourhood. Using the concepts of collaboration (versus cooperation) and resourcefulness (versus resilience), this paper discusses the advantages and limits of academic design projects using two cases from the Academy of a New Gropiusstadt (AnG) in Berlin, Germany. Based on a process of community-based research-by-design, these projects activate spatial facilities and employ full-scale interventions to improve local resilience. Resourceful collaboration at the neighbourhood level demands new intermediary actors and designers as advocates with multi-scalar and transdisciplinary knowledge and abilities to assess and engage with the impacts of their co-produced design work.
16. International Planning
16-6 TRANSNATIONAL PLANNING
33-3764
Construction. Globalization. Peripheral regions. South America. Urbanization.
Many cities around the world have been largely constructed by their residents, who build not only their own houses but also frequently their neighborhoods. In this article, I use the notion of peripheral urbanization to analyze this way of producing cities that is quite pervasive in the global south. I argue that peripheral urbanization refers to modes of the production of space that (a) operate with a specific temporality and agency, (b) engage transversally with official logics, (c) generate new modes of politics, and (d) create highly unequal and heterogeneous cities. I also argue that peripheral urbanization not only produces heterogeneity within the city as it unfolds over time but also varies considerably from one city to another. I build my arguments by juxtaposing dissimilar cases from a few cities in the global south. To focus on peripheral urbanization means simultaneously to de-center urban theory and to offer a bold characterization of modes of the production of space that are different from those that generated the cities of the North Atlantic.
33-3765
Conflict. Geography. Politics. Spatial analysis.
Existing research on the relationship between mountainous terrain and conflict has generally been implemented using crude metrics capturing the actions and motivations of armed groups, both insurgent and government. We provide a more geographically nuanced investigation of two specific propositions relating mountainous terrain to violent conflict activity. Our study covers five wars in the Caucasus region: the second North Caucasus war in Chechnya and neighboring republics (1999–2012); Islamist and Russian government conflict in the same area (2002–2012); fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh (1990–2012); and battles between Georgia and separatists in South Ossetia (1991–2012) and Abkhazia (1992–2012). Our analysis of insurgent and government violence reciprocity illustrates some expected patterns of what we call the operational costs of context. By varying the dimensions for our units of analysis—the context within which violent interactions take place—however, we arrive at differing conclusions. Our research represents a meaningful and transparent engagement with the influences of the well-known and understudied modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) in geographically sensitive analysis.
33-3766
China. Consumption. Mobility. Territory.
This article looks at a trans-Himalayan borderland to see how new road development projects affect social and sovereign relationships across mountain landscapes between Chinese Tibet and Mustang, Nepal. Research asked about local experiences with new forms of motorized transport and popular consumption of Chinese-manufactured commodities to understand what factors led the Nepali state to undertake new bureaucratic projects in a historically peripheral space. Employing a dialectic framework of mobility and containment, a materialist-territorial analysis reveals how transborder infrastructure development affects trade relations and consumption practices in the Nepal–China borderlands and, in turn, how these dynamics condition state-making processes at social and geopolitical levels. Following the cross-scalar trajectory of one rural road project from local grassroots initiative to national development program to international transportation network, I argue that the economic interests of a place-based project with regional cultural connections set in motion an expanding presence of Nepali state apparatuses in a trans-Himalayan borderland space.
METHODOLOGY/QUANTITATIVE/ECONOMIC/QUALITATIVE
20. Methodology
20-1 MATHEMATICAL MODELS
33-3767
Distribution. Geographical analysis. Scales.
The term fractal is used to describe an object displaying self-similarity at different scales. This self-similarity can be measured by either the power-law exponent or the ht-index, which is a recently proposed method for characterizing the fractal nature of geographic features. Although increasingly popular in geography, the ht-index is not sensitive to changes or evolutions of fractals, limiting its usefulness as an alternative “fractal dimension” to the power-law exponent. Two improvements to the ht-index were suggested in the literature, namely, the cumulative rate of growth (the CRG index) and the ratio of areas in a rank-size plot (the RA index). The CRG index is sensitive but not monotonic, however, with respect to the evolution of fractals. The RA index is both sensitive and monotonic but not interpretable in fractal terms. In this article, two novel metrics, referred to as unified metrics, are proposed by combining advantages of the ht-index and all of its improvements, being simultaneously easy to interpret, monotonic with respect to the evolution of fractals, and sensitive to changes in the evolution. The usefulness of unified metrics was demonstrated by both numerical experiments and case studies. Given that the idea behind the ht-index has led to a relaxed, emerging popular definition of fractals, the proposed unified metrics have great potential to be used as the standard fractal dimension along with such a definition.
33-3768
Cellular automata. Land use changes. Remote sensing. Transition.
Based on four time intervals within a forty-year period of observation, we construct land-use/land-cover (LULC) maps and estimate the transition probabilities between six LULC states. The maps and transition probability matrices (TPMs) were built based on the high-resolution aerial photos and 30-m multispectral Landsat images for the same years. We considered the TPM constructed from manual classification of the aerial photos as a reference and compared it to the TPM constructed from the Landsat image classified with several methods: mean-shift segmentation followed by random forest classification and three pixel-based methods popular in cellular automata (CA) studies: K-means, iterative self-organizing data analysis techniques (ISODATA), and maximum likelihood. For each classification method, the TPMs were constructed and compared to the TPMs for the aerial photos. We prove that the goodness-of-fit of maps obtained with the three pixel-based methods was insufficient for estimating the LULC TPM. The LULC maps obtained with the object-based classification fit well to those based on the aerial photos, but the estimates of TPM were yet qualitatively different. This article raises doubts regarding the adequacy of Landsat data and standard classification methods for establishing LULC CA model rules and calls for the careful reexamination of the entire land-use CA framework. We appeal for a new view of the CA modeling methodology: It should be based on a long-term series of carefully validated LULC maps that portray different types of land-use dynamics and land planning systems over long and representative periods of population and economic growth.
33-3769
Geography. Interactive research. Spatial analysis. Spatial model.
One of the key concerns in spatial analysis and modeling is to study and analyze the processes that generate our observations of the real world. The typical global models employed to do this, however, fail to identify spatial variations in these processes because they assume that the processes being investigated are spatially stationary. In many real-life situations, spatial variations in relationships seem plausible and at least worth examining so that the assumption of global stationarity is, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, unrealistic. In contrast, local spatial models allow for potential variations in relationships over space leading to greater insights into the data-generating processes. In this study, a framework for localizing spatial interaction models, based on geographically weighted techniques, is developed. Using the framework, we construct a family of spatially weighted interaction models (SWIM) that can help in detecting, visualizing, and analyzing spatial nonstationarity in spatial interaction processes. Using custom-built algorithms, we apply both traditional interaction models and SWIM to a journey-to-work data set in Switzerland. The results of the model calibrations are explored using matrix visualizations, which suggest that SWIM provide useful information on the nature of spatially nonstationary processes leading to spatial patterns of flows.
33-3770
Analysis. China. Migration. Models. Regional development. Spatial analysis.
Much methodological advancement has been made in the modeling and analysis of regional migration. Previous migration modeling, however, has been done in a black box. The overall performance of a migration model is evaluated with the contribution of all explanatory variables, including regional attributes and spatial interaction effects. This research uses a new method to estimate migration modeling errors by their sources. Following the notion of migration spatial structure, the observed or estimated regional migration matrices of a migration system can be described by four factors: the overall effect, the relative emissiveness and the relative attractiveness of specific regions, and the effect of spatial interaction between pairs of regions. By calculating the contributions of migration factors to the modeling error, this article reveals which factors of the migration process can be modeled more or less accurately using the case of regional migration in China for the period between 2005 and 2010. A network spatially filtered Poisson migration model is estimated for China. Error analysis shows that the modeling errors of the constant K, the relative emissiveness, and attractiveness caused weighted absolute mean errors of 1.20 percent, 14.60 percent, and 15.57 percent in migration flows, respectively. The spatial interaction caused the greatest weighted absolute mean error of 31.55 percent in migration flows. Thus, the spatial interaction effect remains the most difficult to model. The findings of this research point to directions to improve migration modeling. More efforts should be made to improve the approach to model the effect of spatial interaction.
20-2 INFORMATION AND TECHNOLOGY
33-3771
Data sources. Geography. Property. Remote sensing.
Remote sensing, particularly satellite imaging, is widely used in scientific, government, and public applications. One of the reasons it is so highly valued is the perception of its fundamental objectivity and neutrality. Yet like all data, satellite imagery is a product of human action. Elements such as specific technologies, strategic priorities, and privileged interpretations influence the availability and applications of remotely sensed data. We therefore argue that careful examination of the epistemological, social, and political dimensions of these data is a crucial, yet relatively underdeveloped task, especially in the scientific literature. We conduct such an examination through the property regimes (or property rights regimes) framework developed by Schlager and Ostrom. Property regimes are the arrangements by which rights over particular goods are allocated, as well as the roles to which these rights are assigned and the rules that regulate this process. This framework is especially useful in revealing the large contextual variation in the production, use, and appropriation of particular goods, in this case remotely sensed data. Understanding remotely sensed data through the property regimes that govern them emphasizes the political and economic dimensions of this valuable resource and reveals its embeddedness in the world it intends to capture from afar. Thus, we show that to have a better grasp on the role of remotely sensed data in science, policy, and society, users must acknowledge the property regimes and other political interventions that are here shown to be indeed fundamental to their construction.
33-3772
Digital divide. Geography. Internet. Place.
Every day, billions of Internet users rely on search engines to find information about places to make decisions about tourism, shopping, and countless other economic activities. In an opaque process, search engines assemble digital content produced in a variety of locations around the world and make it available to large cohorts of consumers. Although these representations of place are increasingly important and consequential, little is known about their characteristics and possible biases. Analyzing a corpus of Google search results generated for 188 capital cities, this article investigates the geographic dimension of search results, focusing on searches such as “Lagos” and “Rome” on different localized versions of the engine. This study answers these questions: To what degree is this city-related information locally produced and diverse? Which countries are producing their own representations and which are represented by others? Through a new indicator of localness of search results, we identify the factors that contribute to shape this uneven digital geography, combining several development indicators. The development of the publishing industry and scientific production appears as a fairly strong predictor of localness of results. This empirical knowledge will support efforts to curb the digital divide, promoting a more inclusive, democratic information society.
33-3773
Data. Geographic information systems. Surveillance.
Recent revelations of dragnet surveillance by governments around the world have brought attention to privacy and surveillance in their many forms. In this article, we outline the technical mechanisms of geosurveillance to synthesize and inform on a constantly moving target. Despite their interconnections and overlap, to simplify and elucidate these geosurveillance mechanisms, we classify them into three parts: geolocation, unique identification, and the surveillance medium. We show that together they constitute a language that we, as subjects, did not choose yet are increasingly forced to negotiate. Moreover, these mechanisms are both numerous and highly complex and are only one component within large ecosystems of geosurveillance, making privacy ever more evasive. Understanding the mechanisms of our own subjection is integral to any prospects for intervention, however. As such, we highlight the Tor network as an example of resistance to geosurveillance that is enabled by acutely understanding the hypertechnical language that otherwise binds us. Indeed, as we emphasize throughout, mechanism matters.
20-3 STATISTICS/ECONOMETRICS
33-3774
Arts. Human geography. Time.
We discuss two shared elements in the temporal perspective of human and physical geography—chronology and narration. An example of the use of these elements is in practice provided by repeat photography, a technique used in both subdisciplines, but these elements also are deployed in the development of the theories that shape the fields. We argue that their role in enhancing the “telling of temporal and spatial stories” can contribute to the resolution of issues beyond what is usually thought of as the domain of academic geography.
20-4 RESEARCH METHODS
33-3775
Classification. Geographic information systems. Mapping techniques. Maps. Uncertainty.
A choropleth map frequently is used to portray the spatial pattern of attributes, and its mapping result heavily relies on map classification. Uncertainty in an attribute has an influence on map classification and, accordingly, can generate an unreliable spatial pattern. Only a few studies, however, have explored the implications of uncertainty in map classification. Recent studies present methods to incorporate uncertainty in map classification and generate a more reliable spatial pattern. Nevertheless, these methods often produce an undesirable result, with most observations assigned to one class, and struggle to find an optimal result. The purpose of this article is to expand the discussion about finding an optimal classification result considering data uncertainty in a map classification. Specifically, this article proposes optimal classification methods based on a shortest path problem in an acyclic network. These methods use dissimilarity measures and various cost and objective functions that simultaneously can consider attribute estimates and their uncertainty. Implementation of the proposed methods is in an ArcGIS environment with interactive graphic tools, illustrated with a mapping application of the American Community Survey data in Texas. The proposed methods successfully produce map classification results, achieving improved homogeneity within a class.
33-3776
Areas. Census. Entropy. Land allocation. Mortality.
Small area health estimates are important for studying environmental exposure, disease transmission, and health outcomes at the local scale. Yet, to protect privacy, the majority of publicly available health data are aggregated within larger spatial units such as states or counties. This article describes a method to generate small area mortality estimates from individual microdata that are available only for larger geographic entities. The mortality estimates are based on the probabilistic reweighting and spatial allocation of a population constructed by combining the individual-level microdata with census tract–level summary data. The generated mortality counts can be used to explore local mortality patterns and identify clusters of mortality from various causes. Validation of the allocated death counts against actual restricted-use census tract–level death counts suggests that the estimated counts reliably duplicate the total mortality patterns found in the actual data. The allocations of cause-specific mortality outcomes are less accurate, however.
33-3777
Climate. Natural disasters. Spatial analysis. Time.
A tropical cyclone (TC) is a cyclonic weather system with compact, centrally organized precipitation. As a TC transitions from a symmetric warm-core cyclone to an extratropical system, or as the TC dissipates, the weather system loses its characteristic central, symmetric qualities. In this article, we demonstrate a shape metric methodology that can be used to assess the overall evolution of and the spatiotemporal positions of significant changes to synoptic-scale precipitation structure. We first illustrate this methodology using three-hourly North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) accumulated precipitation in Hurricane Katrina (2005) and then extend the analysis to all 2004 to 2015 U.S. landfalling TCs. To quantify the shape of the precipitation pattern, we construct a binary image by limiting the search radius to a distance of 600 km from the TC center and applying a minimum threshold based on the 90th percentile of precipitation observed within the search radius. Using the fundamental geographic concept of compactness, we formulate a suite of shape metrics that encompass the characteristic geometries of TCs moving into the midlatitudes: asymmetry, fragmentation, and dispersiveness. As we demonstrate with Hurricane Katrina, a moving Mann–Whitney U test reveals significant shape changes during the TC life cycle. These evolutionary periods correspond to structural changes observed by National Hurricane Center forecasters. Extending the analysis to all 2004 to 2015 storms, we observe increasing (decreasing) compactness in the eastern and central (western) Gulf of Mexico. Dispersiveness increases prior to landfall in most cases; however, asymmetry and fragmentation increase more commonly in western (vs. eastern) Gulf landfalls.
20-5 QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS
33-3778
Experimental research. Experiments. Radical planning.
This forum brings together five essays that explore the potential and the limitations of geography’s intradisciplinarity. Each one, authored by a pair of geographers who share a common thematic interest but who come from different subareas of the discipline, represents the results of thinking, speaking, and writing across the methodological, conceptual, and theoretical divides that characterize our discipline and academic knowledge in general. As experiments in doing intradisciplinary work and the difficult pluralism that we hope that work connotes, these essays underline the promise and demonstrate the confines of intradisciplinary work and its radical potential.
33-3779
Sampling. Social networks. Spatial autocorrelation.
Hidden populations are defined as subsets of a larger population that are hard to target with traditional (e.g., random) sampling methods. For qualitative research, difficulties of achieving a good sample could include the time of day surveys are conducted, the safety of interviewers in areas with high crime rates, or the unwillingness of members in a hidden population to interact with researchers. Various chain-driven methods, such as snowball sampling (SS) and respondent-driven sampling (RDS), have been developed as techniques to reach hidden populations. Such methodologies have been implemented in previous research for investigations into the networks of people associated with illicit drug use and other risky behavior. To date, some of these studies have considered the contribution to variance inflation attributed to the effects of social network (SN) autocorrelation but not to spatial autocorrelation. This article implements a probabilistic simulation based on two RDS network data sets: one from Rio de Janeiro and another from the Colorado Springs metropolitan region. The network configurations are studied with respect to their associated geographic landscapes and a set of selected census variables. The results of the simulations demonstrate a lack of bias on the mean of the demographic variables and impacts on sample-to-sample variability attributed to both SN autocorrelation and spatial autocorrelation in the presence of other sources of excess variance. Findings reported in this article offer insights into designing future studies using network-based sampling strategies.
21. Population
21-2 POPULATION PLANNING
33-3780
Boundaries. Census. Data.
Social scientists regularly rely on population estimates when studying change in small areas over time. Census tract data in the United States are a prime example, as there are substantial shifts in tract boundaries from decade to decade. This study compares alternative estimates of the 2000 population living within 2010 tract boundaries to the Census Bureau’s own retabulation. All methods of estimation are subject to error; this is the first study to directly quantify the error in alternative interpolation methods for U.S. census tracts. A simple areal weighting method closely approximates the estimates provided by one standard source (the Neighborhood Change Data Base), with some improvement provided by considering only area not covered by water. More information is used by the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB), which relies on a combination of areal and population interpolation as well as ancillary data about water-covered areas. Another set of estimates provided by the National Historical Geographic Information Systems (NHGIS) uses data about land cover in 2001 and the current road network and distribution of population and housing units at the block level. Areal weighting alone results in a large error in a substantial share of tracts that were divided in complex ways. The LTDB and NHGIS perform much better in all situations but are subject to some error when boundaries of both tracts and their component blocks are redrawn. Users of harmonized tract data should be watchful for potential problems in either of these data sources.
21-4 MIGRATION
33-3781
Border regions. Borders. Immigrants. Immigration. Immigration policy.
In the late 2000s, several U.S. states and local governments enacted legislation to make work and life difficult for unauthorized immigrants within their jurisdictions. We investigate how these devolved immigration enforcement laws affected the migration of Latinos to these states. We find that after these hostile policies came into effect, noncitizen and naturalized Latinos from states without such policies were much less likely to move to states with them than in the 1990s. U.S.-born Latinos exhibit migration aversion to hostile states, albeit at a weaker level. Fear of discrimination and the blending of Latinos with different legal status within families might account for this broad Latino group migration response. Hostile policies produced no significant change in the interstate migration patterns of a control group of U.S.-born whites. A counterfactual analysis indicates that absent these enforcement regimes, the migratory redistribution of Latinos to hostile states from other states in the late 2000s would have continued the dispersive pattern of the late 1990s. We draw parallels between our research and state policy effects on U.S. internal migration for other groups.
33-3782
Colonialism. Migrants. Power. Urban areas.
Qatar has been projecting power through a series of spectacles, investments, and interventions. These include the new Doha skyline; ownership of the tallest building in Europe (London’s Shard); Al Jazeera media; involvement in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars; and, importantly, hosting global events such as the 2022 soccer World Cup. Qatar also holds 14 percent of all known natural gas reserves and boasts the world’s highest per-capita income. Our article relates Qatar’s global visibility and presence to processes of power and accumulation in its capital city, Doha. We do this through a focus on migrant workers who, in this highly urbanized state, make up 89 percent of the population. Their lives and labors provide a window on the relationships between different stages of power and accumulation: the spectacle and the work and labor that sustain it. Intersecting geographies of foreign labor and the urban spectacle require scrutiny through sharpened critical and postcolonial lenses on diversity and urban modernity.
33-3783
Human behavior. Migration. Population.
For well over a century, migration researchers have recognized the lack of adequate distance measures to be a key obstacle for advancing understanding of internal migration. The problem arises from the convention of spatially defining migration as the crossing of administrative borders. Because administrative regions vary in size, shape, and settlement patterns, it is difficult to tell how far movers go, raising doubts about the generalizability of research in the field. This article shows that satellite data on nighttime lights can be used to infer accurate measures of migration distance. We first use the intensity of nighttime lights to locate mean population centers that closely correspond to mean population centers calculated from actual population data. Until now, locating mean population centers accurately has been problematic, as it has required highly disaggregated population data, which are lacking in many countries. The nighttime lights data, which are freely available on a yearly basis, solve this challenge. We then show that this information can be used to accurately estimate migration distances.
33-3784
Agriculture. Farmers. Farming. Labor migration. Mobility.
Migrant farmworkers in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) are bound by unfree labor relations. Migrants are employed by and live adjacent to Canadian family farms. Extending current research on Canada’s SAWP, I specifically conceptualize the family farm as a locus of unfree labor relations. The article identifies how employers impose mobility controls around migrants’ freedom to leave their workplaces, circumscribing where, how, and when migrants can circulate in Canadian communities. Growers use discourses and practices of paternal care and protection to justify these controls, revealing the familial features of employer–employee relationships. Harnessing a relational understanding of the family farm, I argue that worker (im)mobilities reveal key features of extant family farm relationships. Direct involvement by state officials and legal frameworks undergirding the SAWP effectively enable and sanction employer practices. Contributing to mobilities research, I identify how family farms exercise and directly benefit from state-sanctioned forms of power that allow them to restrict and regulate migrants’ mobilities at localized levels. With relevance to both Canadian and U.S. contexts, the power to “fix” farm labor in place is highly desirable for family farms as a labor control mechanism. Material geographies of everyday (im)mobility help employers and states secure high levels of labor control from this low-wage migrant labor force. Arguments are based on qualitative research with fifteen migrant farmworkers employed on ten farms in Norfolk County, Ontario, Canada, as well as additional interviews with sending government officials, local civil society, and growers.
22. Economics
22-1 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH
33-3785
Regional characteristics. Science and technology. Urban renewal. War.
Promoters and critics of the creative-cities script assume that it originated in the late 1990s. In contrast, in this article I argue that the mythology of the creative class and its positive economic and cultural influence on cities began during the early Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, regional alliances of business and elites reinvented scientists as powerful figures on which they anchored their efforts to remake the economies and built environments of U.S. cities. To pursue their plans, these alliances described scientists as finicky, objective, and mobile characters who, if satisfied, would contribute disproportionally as citizens of a region. They enrolled scientists as valuable allies who helped craft a narrative in which urban renewal was universally beneficial for an entire region. In this article I examine how members of Pittsburgh’s celebrated regional alliance, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD), installed scientists at the heart of their effort to transform the industrial region during the early Cold War. This longer history reveals how regional alliances invented the creative-cities script as a means to facilitate elite and business-driven urban redevelopment. From its inception, the script was designed to prioritize the interests of businesses, the wealthy, and the white middle class at the expense of the working class and people of color.
22-2 ECONOMIC DECLINE/RESTRUCTURING
33-3786
Climate change. Economic instability. Financial crisis. Governance. Neoliberalism.
In recent years, climate change has increasingly come to be seen as one of the principal threats to future global financial stability. This article identifies and critiques the emerging consensus among international financial regulators as to how this threat—the key perceived components of which are also delineated—can best be managed. It shows that the preferred approach mirrors hegemonic postfinancial crisis regulatory practice vis-à-vis financial stability risk more generically: prioritization of market discipline underpinned by risk disclosure. The article characterizes this approach as a quintessentially neoliberal modality of governance. It also argues that insofar as this approach relies on financial market workings and financial institutional behaviors explicitly belied by the financial crisis, it risks precisely the type of “climate Minsky moment” regulators aim to avoid.
22-6 SPATIAL ANALYSIS/MODELS
33-3787
Ecology. Geography. Industrial sector. Politics.
In this article, I argue that political ecology has neglected examining the “hidden abodes” of industrial factory production. I suggest a visit to such sites can expand and deepen what counts as both ecology and politics in the field. Ecologically speaking, the industrial secondary sector is not only at the center of the overall “metabolism” between society and nature but also is central in producing many large-scale ecological problems like climate change. Politically, although much of political ecology focuses on marginalization, dispossession, and what I call “following the politics” (i.e., protest and resistance movements), industrial environments often entail uncontested power over massive flows of raw materials, energy, and waste. I suggest that political ecology analysis can use chains of explanation to make these industrial ecologies political. To illustrate the argument, I focus on a large industrial nitrogen fertilizer facility in southern Louisiana. In the empirical sections of this article, I examine its control over the highly politicized chemical compounds of natural gas (CH4), ammonia (NH3), and carbon dioxide (CO2). Although the industrial facility largely benefits from its access to and control over these substances, the politics of them is directed elsewhere along the commodity chain to naturalized areas more familiar to political ecologists (e.g., sites of natural gas extraction or agricultural application). I conclude by suggesting that making this kind of analysis political requires that we disseminate our analysis and critiques to broader publics.
33-3788
Agriculture. Environmental governance. Location. Regulation theory. Regulatory policy. Social theory.
This article investigates the process through which transnational firms select and develop sites for their operations. I build a framework to understand how firms’ localization strategies not only entail a choice among regulatory regimes but how they also coproduce those regimes while responding to community resistance. My account is based on a multisited ethnography of two research and development hubs for the U.S. corn seed market. The genetically modified (GM) corn seed industry is an important (and somewhat unusual) case because firms’ competitiveness hinges on staying in particular environments, rendering them relatively place-bound—which can be used by local actors as a negotiating tool for better environmental and labor arrangements. I compare two cases of firms’ localization strategies—one (Hawaii) in which firms are confronted by local actors who question GM crop safety and another (Puerto Rico) in which firms face little local opposition and, in fact, are lauded as economic engines of development. My work shows that firms’ success hinges on balancing a site’s natural endowments with its sociopolitical and regulatory constraints. Contrasting approaches that view firms’ localization as a single moment of decision making, I conceptualize localization as a multistep process of negotiating a regulatory regime with local institutions—not just shopping for the right environment but shaping it and actively taking actions to stay there. In proposing a power-sensitive approach to location and regulation theory, my work highlights sociohistorical patterns of inequality, contributing to our understanding of how corporate localization strategies affect local control over environmental governance.
33-3789
Financing. Nature. Rent. United States.
This article looks at the changing nature of property access regimes in northeastern Maine. The state’s unique “open lands” tradition has come under threat as a result of the large-scale restructuring of the timber industry from vertically integrated forest products companies toward individual and institutional investor-owners. Using a large conservation project in the town of Grand Lake Stream as a case study, I argue that new investor-owners have been able to generate profits by enclosing long-standing common access regimes and commanding monopoly rent payments. After reviewing literatures on rent, enclosure, and the commodification of nature, I examine two prominent examples of this process of rent extraction through the enclosure of common access regimes: lease lots and working forest conservation easements. The article concludes arguing for regulatory intervention, as well as the need for more concrete case studies on the impacts of financial investment on the biophysical environment.
33-3790
Employment. High-tech industries. Metropolitan areas. Poverty. Wages.
High-technology industries are seen as important in helping urban economies thrive, but at the same time they are often considered potential drivers of relative poverty and social exclusion. Little research, however, has assessed how high-tech affects urban poverty and the wages of workers with little formal education. This article addresses this gap in the literature and investigates the relationships among employment in high-tech industries, poverty, and the labor market for non-degree-educated workers using a panel of 295 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States between 2005 and 2011. The results show no real impact of the presence of high-technology industries on poverty and, especially, extreme poverty. Yet there is strong evidence that tech employment increases wages for non-degree-educated workers and, to a lesser extent, employment for those without degrees. These findings suggest that although tech employment has some role in improving welfare for non-degree-educated workers, tech employment alone is not enough to reduce poverty.
33-3791
Inequality. Space. Spatial autocorrelation. Time.
In the study of income inequality dynamics, the concept of exchange mobility plays a central role. Applications of classical rank correlation statistics have been used to assess the degree to which individual economies swap positions in the income distribution over time. These classic measures ignore the underlying geographical pattern of rank changes. Rey (2004) introduced a spatial concordance statistic as an extension of Kendall’s rank correlation statistic, a commonly employed measure of exchange mobility. This article suggests local forms of the global spatial concordance statistic: local indicators of mobility association (LIMA). The LIMA statistics allow for the decomposition of the global measure into the contributions associated with individual locations. They do so by considering the degree of concordance (stability) or discordance (exchange mobility) reflected within an economy’s local spatial context. Different forms of the LIMAs derive from alternative expressions of the neighborhood and neighbor set. Additionally, the additive decomposition of the LIMAs permits the development of a mesolevel analytic to examine whether the overall space–time concordance is driven by either interregional or intraregional concordance. The measures are illustrated in a case study that examines regional income dynamics in Mexico.
33-3792
Data. Data sources. Entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs. Geography. Internet. Social networks. Spatial data.
As we begin to understand who uses particular social media platforms, this user information represents a way forward for understanding the types of research questions for which big data might prove valuable. In this respect, the use of social media data for analyzing entrepreneurial networks represents a promising research domain. Not only does the user profile of social media users overlap substantially with the profile of entrepreneurs, but research highlights that the entrepreneurial process is a fundamentally networked activity. Given this research promise, this study analyzes digitally mediated interactions using Twitter data collected about a variety of actors engaged in entrepreneurial networks for the United States over an eighteen-month period. Analytical results reveal that the hashtags used in this analysis (#smallbiz and #entrepreneur) do capture (albeit not exhaustively) well-known actors in entrepreneurial networks, as well as important subtleties in the geography of locales engaged in these networks. The article closes with an agenda for big data research on entrepreneurship that highlights the important role of geographers in unraveling these networked geographies given the complexities of ground-truthing geographic information from big data sources.
22-8 WELFARE ECONOMICS
33-3793
Economy. Free market. Labor markets. Migrants.
There is growing interest in the sharing economy as a different way of living in neoliberal capitalist societies, but this discussion is frequently heavily classed and the ethos generally rests on excess capacity of goods and services. This article intervenes in this emerging body of writing to argue that it is equally important to explore the types of sharing and exchange that are survival-compelled among those with precarious livelihoods. Precarious migrants are a group facing significant livelihood pressures, and we are concerned here with a particular category of insecure migrants: irregular migrants including refused asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. Such migrants are especially shaped by their sociolegal status, and without rights to work or welfare they are susceptible to exploitation in their survival-oriented laboring. Existing literature from labor geographies and the subdisciplinary area of unfree and forced labor has not generally focused on the experiences of these migrants as house guests in domestic realms, nor has it thoroughly explored their transactional labor. As such, this article argues that the moral economies of gifting and sharing within such labor create and reproduce particular social structures, cultural norms, and relationships that position people along a spectrum of freedom and exploitation.
PHYSICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL
30. Housing and Real Estate
30-2 CONSTRUCTION/MAINTENANCE/HOUSING AND BUILDING CODES
33-3794
Building materials. Buildings. Climate change. Infrastructure. Regulation. Risk. Technology.
The challenge of climate change for building regulation is explored based on long-term, personal observations of US building regulatory systems that are intended to safeguard the public. Systemic problems and patterns have allowed significant, large-scale hazards (e.g., those related to climate change) to be excluded from consideration in regulatory systems. Regulatory systems are typically not comprehensive, designed, integrated systems. Instead, they are silos of regulatory responsibility with gaps in authority. The system lacks formal processes to address emergent hazards. There is an absence of formal processes to assess and balance risks across hazard types, locations, timeframes and scales. The current regulatory goal of preventing or limiting known harm is compared with the positive outcome goals of the Living Building Challenge (LBC). The more comprehensive scope of the LBC and its goals surpass the existing code, but ironically, LBC projects often struggle to gain regulatory approval due to its use of innovative approaches. Potential avenues to create more comprehensive and effective regulatory systems are suggested. It is proposed that the purpose of the regulatory role is expanded from policing the arbitrary boundary between what is legal and illegal to one that includes enabling the most regenerative and positive outcomes.
33-3795
Construction. Customers. Europe. Housing. Quality.
Although inspections occur during construction or at handover, customers do not normally participate. This situation creates a gap between the quality perceived by both contractors and customers. An analysis of 52 552 handover defects in 2179 flats in Spain is presented which identified their nature, the building element and trade where these defects are located. These results are compared with previous studies that analysed defects detected during the construction stage and those that remain after handing over the building to the client. The research reveals that structural defects are resolved during construction due to existing quality standards. However, other aesthetic and functional defects remain and/or arise at handover. Some defects are not resolved until customers complain after they first occupy the dwelling. Many functional defects arise due to the lack of involvement of end users in the early project stages.
33-3796
Building materials. Carbon dioxide. Construction. Emissions. Greenhouses. Knowledge.
As is the case in a number of countries, the UK construction industry faces the challenge of expanding production whilst making ambitious greenhouse gas emission reductions. Embodied carbon constitutes a growing proportion of whole-life carbon emissions and accounts for a significant share of total UK emissions. A key mitigation strategy is increasing the use of alternative materials with lower embodied carbon. The economic, technical, practical and cultural barriers to the uptake of these alternatives are explored through a survey of construction professionals and interviews with industry leaders. Perceptions of high cost, ineffective allocation of responsibility, industry culture, and the poor availability of product and building-level carbon data and benchmarks constitute significant barriers. Opportunities to overcome these barriers include earlier engagement of professionals along the supply chain, effective use of whole-life costing, and changes to contract and tender documents. A mounting business case exists for addressing embodied carbon, but has yet to be effectively disseminated. In the meantime, the moral convictions of individual clients and practitioners have driven early progress. However, this research underscores the need for new regulatory drivers to complement changing attitudes if embodied carbon is to be established as a mainstream construction industry concern.
33-3797
Buildings. Climate change. Disaster. Environmental policy. Governance. Public policy. Regulation. Safety.
Scientists predict a future with more natural disasters due to climate change. Up-to-date building codes can reduce carbon emissions and make the built environment more resilient. However, the hostile environment for code adoption and lax enforcement in many jurisdictions in the United States impede the full potential of building codes to moderate the impacts of climate change. There are three ‘realpolitik’ reasons that building codes are not as effective as they could be in moderating the impacts of climate change. First, most building code review and approval boards are comprised of construction industry professionals who rarely take climate change into account. Second, the homebuilding industry is waging an effective advocacy campaign against updating building codes in general, particularly objecting to improved energy efficiency through building energy codes. Finally, enforcement of building codes, especially energy codes, is uneven. Overcoming these political and practical challenges requires greater activity in the areas of participation, pricing and policing. Interest groups and policy-makers must become more engaged in code advocacy. Price signals must internalize the costs imposed on society by damage from climate change. Finally, improving compliance and enforcement through training and additional resources should be a priority.
31. Energy
31-1 ENERGY POLICY
33-3798
Buildings. Contingent valuation. Environmental assessment. Management. Performance measurement. Property. Strategic planning.
The existing literature (mostly referencing heuristics of the valuation profession) provides little evidence on how property owners and managers themselves perceive value creation from environmental certification (EC) of buildings. To address this issue, questionnaire and interview data from non-residential EC building owners in Sweden are gathered and related in a ‘strategy map’ that explains their perceived value creation from EC. The mapping process also considers the four standard perspectives of the balanced scorecard, prompting researchers and owners to evaluate EC in terms of its contribution to long-term strategy, measuring it according to financial and non-financial metrics of organizational performance. The study confirmed that tenant demand is an important EC driver for property owners (particularly for large organizations) and therefore that increased EC awareness amongst tenants is important for EC and for further value creation. It was found that tool developers, property owners and valuers could all benefit from more closely aligning valuers’ documentation requirements with those for accreditation with EC tools. Energy efficiency contributes significantly to value creation, but owners use energy management programs in addition to EC, possibly as a result of the performance gap phenomenon.
33-3799
Adaptation. Built environment. Cities. Climate change. Public policy. Urban planning.
Drawing on a thematic analysis of relevant policy documents, an apparent disconnect is identified between two associated contemporary UK policy areas: planning for heatwaves and community resilience. Regional and national policy documents that plan for heatwaves in the UK tend to focus on institutional emergency responses and infrastructure development. In these documents, although communities are mentioned, they are understood as passive recipients of resilience that is provided by active institutions. Meanwhile, contemporary discussion about community resilience highlights the potential for involving communities in planning for and responding to emergencies (although the concept is also the subject of critique). To improve heatwave preparation, planning and response, more effort by central and local governments is required to articulate and realize greater participation by individuals, and voluntary and community sector groups.
33-3800
Energy policy. Energy sector. Financial services. Performance. Risk management.
The energy performance contracting market is potentially substantial but very little work has been undertaken to understand the characteristics of successful projects. This study uses a probabilistic analysis of four hypothetical projects in the UK schools sector under the 2014 policy regime, combined with qualitative interviews with practitioners, to explore the conditions for a viable project. It finds that the proposed approach has the potential to allow more detailed exploration of project structures and scope for creating greater understanding of likely returns and the factors affecting them. Evidence is found that the use of deterministic risk screening techniques such as simple payback results in viable opportunities being overlooked. The risk profiles for clients and contractors (energy service companies – ESCOs) are not symmetrical and they will each find different projects more attractive. The results suggest that greater consideration needs to be given to the precise risk allocation between client and contractor to ensure that likely returns are properly understood. This study demonstrates a method for exploring project characteristics that can be used to understand their impacts on the financial returns for clients and contractors.
33-3801
Commodity. Commodity culture. Compensation programs. Resettlement.
Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore the transformation of nature–society relations among the Heuny people. We argue that the compensation processes of valuation, abstraction, and privatization of property relations have contributed to the variegated commodification of land and other natural resources used by the Heuny. In contrast to arguments that capitalist expansion leads to ever increasing commodification, however, we demonstrate that compensation variously decommodifies other natural resources, such as certain nontimber forest products and wild fisheries, keeping other things, such as swidden fields and forest land, noncommodified. Moreover, these processes of variegated commodification are spatially variable, largely dependent on Heuny conceptions of space, thus affecting the commodification of land and other natural resources. Ultimately, by linking compensation to processes of (de)-commodification in its various forms, we suggest new ways in which capitalist social relations are being transformed and expanded through hydropower-induced resettlement. Furthermore, we call into question the ability of material compensation to restore previous livelihood and environmental conditions, as changes brought on by the compensation process itself have much deeper and profound implications when it comes to nature–society relations.
33-3802
Energy planning. Energy policy. Governance. Management. Retail industry. Strategic planning.
Improving the environmental performance of non-domestic buildings is a complex and ‘wicked’ problem due to conflicting interests and incentives. This is particularly challenging in tenanted spaces, where landlord and tenant interactions are regulated through leases that traditionally ignore environmental considerations. ‘Green leasing’ is conceptualized as a form of ‘middle-out’ inter-organizational environmental governance that operates between organizations, alongside other drivers. This paper investigates how leases are evolving to become ‘greener’ in the UK and Australia, providing evidence from five varied sources on: (1) UK office and retail leases, (2) UK retail sector energy management, (3) a major UK retailer case study; (4) office leasing in Sydney, and (5) expert interviews on Australian retail leases. With some exceptions, the evidence reveals an increasing trend towards green leases in prime offices in both countries, but not in retail or sub-prime offices. Generally introduced by landlords, adopted green leases contain a variety of ambitions and levels of enforcement. As an evolving form of private–private environmental governance, green leases form a valuable framework for further tenant–landlord cooperation within properties and across portfolios. This increased cohesion could create new opportunities for polycentric governance, particularly at the interface of cities and the property industry.
33-3803
Buildings. Commercial sector. Energy efficiency. Governance. Policy. Regulation.
Building regulations are an important policy instrument available to governments wishing to improve building energy efficiency, which should be a priority to policy-makers wishing to target cost-effective avenues in support of carbon-abatement targets. Meanwhile, building system commissioning has been recognized as a cost-effective measure to cut energy consumption, but in practice commissioning quality can deliver less-than-satisfactory outcomes. Regulation needs to better support commissioning outcomes. A five-grade commissioning scale is developed to assess the quality of commissioning and propose a common language to assist with regulation setting. Using this scale, building regulation and polices related to new and refurbished building commissioning were analysed in comparative case studies between jurisdictions England and California. This study finds that Californian regulations mandate a higher quality of commissioning and regulations that are more enforceable. The crucial elements to support better-commissioned buildings were identified as: outputs-focused regulation (not input based); regulation and process clarity; commissioning agents and building official training; as well as acknowledging the financial burden of upholding more complex building regulations. For the full benefit of commissioning to be realized, policy and regulations for existing buildings will be required.
33-3804
Buildings. Carbon dioxide. Climate change. Emissions. Energy policy. Governance. Policy evaluation. Trade.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has been actively promoting comprehensive policy measures to reduce carbon emissions from non-residential buildings. Among them, the Tokyo Cap-and-Trade Program (TCTP), implemented since 2010, is an important measure to accelerate the building sector’s emission reduction to achieve Tokyo’s greenhouse gas target, 25% reduction by 2020 from a year 2000 baseline level. Under TCTP, all large commercial and industrial facilities are required to achieve the 25% reduction in two compliance periods (FY2010–14 and FY2015–19). An emission-trading scheme was established that allows building owners to purchase carbon credits to compensate for shortfalls and sell excess reductions over the obligations. This paper assesses the effectiveness of TCTP based on extensive data obtained from 1300 facilities covered by the programme and surveys among facility owners from the first compliance phase. Data indicate that TCTP has been working effectively to reduce energy consumption in participating facilities to meet the ambitious emission reduction goals, to introduce new technologies, and to raise awareness and drive behavioural changes for energy demand reduction. TCTP is examined as an alternative policy instrument to building energy codes in a portfolio of sustainable building policies, highlighting its unique capacity for driving deeper and longer-term improvements for more ambitious mitigation targets.
33-3805
Economic conditions. Governance. Population density. Regulation. Transaction costs.
Incentive schemes formed by regulatory or administrative instruments are measures to promote green building (GB) and increase the motivation of developers to meet higher standards. The hidden costs to different stakeholders during the GB transaction are often ignored. Understanding these hidden transaction costs (TCs) helps appraise the costs and benefits of GB and policy effectiveness. The example of a gross floor area (GFA) concession scheme is used systematically to explore and understand the fundamental issues of TCs’ typology and chronology in the GB development process. The GFA concession scheme is a popular incentive due to its indirect compensation to developers by allowing additional floor area without expenditure by government to implement GBs. A TCs’ framework is used critically to review and evaluate the costs and benefits of the GFA concession scheme. Its particular implementation in both Hong Kong and Singapore is explored. Hong Kong is used as a case study, complemented with in-depth expert interviews on GFA concession in Hong Kong. The key contribution is to establish the parameters for estimating the optimum GFA bonus that could both motivate various stakeholders and minimize the negative impacts on the built environment in future.
33-3806
Buildings. Energy efficiency. European Union. Policy making. Public policy. Regulation.
Energy efficiency policy is expected to play a key role for meeting the European Union’s energy targets (particularly for reduced energy demand and reduced CO2 emissions) using a range of policy instrument combinations. However, most analyses undertaken so far have focused on single-policy measures rather than developing a more generic framework for assessing to what extent a particular policy mix is effective and under which specific conditions. This paper both contributes to the theoretical literature on policy mixes and undertakes an empirical analysis of the current policy mixes in buildings efficiency policy in 14 European Union countries. Building on the existing literature, and using expert knowledge, an assessment of the interaction of 55 pairs of policies is presented. This identifies policy mixes likely to deliver more, less or the same energy savings in combination than singly. The theoretical assessment is compared with actual policy mixes present within the European Union, highlighting that combinations of multiple financial incentives may need further investigation. By bringing these forms of knowledge together, the paper suggests how buildings policy mixes could be made more effective, shows gaps in current knowledge and highlights key research needs.
33-3807
Building performance. Carbon dioxide. Climate change. Energy regulation. Environmental planning. Governance. Performance.
Acknowledging the limitations of traditional, mandatory governance instruments (building codes, planning legislation) to achieve low-carbon buildings, governments, firms and other organizations have been experimenting with alternatives. This trend has become known as the ‘new governance’. This paper brings together 50 new-governance instruments to understand better this new governance for low-carbon buildings, and what may be expected from it. It finds that new-governance instruments fall short in exactly the same areas as do traditional instruments. It argues for a change in the application of new-governance instruments along three paths to improve their performance.
33-3808
Building performance. China. Energy policy. Energy regulation. Governance. Policy. Regulation.
In response to climate change, governments are developing policies to move toward ultra-low-energy or ‘zero-energy’ buildings (ZEBs). Policies, codes, and governance structures vary among regions, and there is no universally accepted definition of a ZEB. These variables make it difficult, for countries such as China that wish to set similar goals, to determine an optimum approach. This paper reviews ZEBs policies, programmes, and governance approaches in two jurisdictions that are leading ZEBs development: Denmark and the state of California in the United States. Different modes of governance (hierarchy: principal–agent relations, market: self organizing and network: independent actors) are examined specifically in relation to policy instruments (prescriptive, performance or outcome-based). The analysis highlights differences in institutional conditions and examines available data on energy performance resulting from a building policy framework. The purpose is to identify ZEBs governance and implementation deficits in China and analyse alternative governance approaches that could be employed in China, which is currently developing ZEBs targets and policies. Conclusions suggest that the ZEBs governance structure in China could benefit from widened participation by all societal actors involved in achieving ZEBs targets. China’s ZEBs policies would benefit from employing a more balanced hybrid governance approach.
31-2 ENERGY MODELING
33-3809
Built environment. Cooperative planning. Energy policy. Energy resources. Models. Planning agency. Social capital.
This transdisciplinary research case study sought to disrupt the usual ways public participation shapes future energy systems. An interdisciplinary group of academics and a self-assembling public of a North English town co-produced ‘bottom-up’ visions for a future local energy system by emphasizing local values, aspirations and desires around energy futures. The effects of participatory modelling are considered as part of a community visioning process on participants’ social learning and social capital. This paper examines both the within-process dynamics related to models and the impact of the outside process, political use of the models by the participants. Both a numerical model (to explore local electricity generation and demand) and a physical scale model of the town were developed to explore various aspects of participants’ visions. The case study shows that collaborative visioning of local energy systems can enhance social learning and social capital of communities. However, the effect of participatory modelling on these benefits is less clear. Tensions arise between ‘inspiring’ and ‘empowering’ role of visions. It is argued that the situatedness of the visioning processes needs to be recognized and integrated within broader aspects of governance and power relations.
33-3810
Adaptive behavior. Behavior. Housing. Learning. Participatory research. Planning agency. Science and technology. Social indicators.
There is an acknowledged need for buildings and communities to be more resilient in the face of unpredictable effects of climate change, economic crises and energy supplies. The notion and social practices involving ‘redundancy’ (the ability to switch between numerous available choices beyond optimal design) are explored as an aspect of resilience theory. Practice and Social Learning theories are used as a lens through which to explore the available redundancy in housing and home environments to help prevent performance failure through unexpected circumstances or in response to varying user needs. Findings from an in depth UK housing case study show how redundancy is linked with the capacity to share resources and to learn both individually and collectively as a community. Such learning in relation to resilient low-carbon living is shown to be co-produced effectively through participatory action research. The benefits of introducing extra redundancy in housing design and community development to accommodate varied user’s understanding and preferences are discussed in relation to future proofing, value and scalar issues. Recommendations include better understanding of the design, time and monetary contribution needed to implement social or technical redundancy. These costs should be evaluated in context of savings made through greater resilience achieved.
31-3 ENERGY CONSERVATION
33-3811
Buildings. Climate policy. Energy efficiency. Energy policy. Policy planning.
To achieve European Union (EU) greenhouse gas emissions of 80–95% below 1990 levels by 2050, CO2 emissions from residential energy consumption must be substantially reduced. Recognition of this has led to the introduction of a range of policy instruments at both EU and member state level. These policies are examined for the EU and the UK, first by grouping them into three ‘pillars of policy’ – standards and engagement, markets and pricing, and strategic investment (each of which focus on different ‘domains of change’ embodying different economic processes) – and then by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each pillar in terms of instrument coverage and effectiveness. Strengths and weaknesses common to both UK and EU policy landscapes are found, including a comprehensive but broadly ineffective standards and engagement pillar of policy, and an ineffective markets and pricing landscape (including effective subsidization of energy consumption in the UK, permitted by the EU), with poor coverage. The strategic investment landscape is found (until recently) to be substantially stronger in the UK compared with EU instruments and requirements. Priority reform actions are also proposed to address the weaknesses identified. The paper also offers discussion of recent policy developments in the UK.
33-3812
Building stock. Cities. Europe. Housing. Resource conservation.
Vacant housing has been associated with a variety of interests from economic implications and consequences for the urban structure to the possibility of providing housing for the homeless. In addition to these social and financial aspects, unused buildings have resources embedded in them. They take land from other activities and contain refined natural resources in the form of building components and materials. Therefore, empty buildings can be regarded as reserves for housing and repositories for urban mining, i.e. material extraction. In doing so, these buildings contribute to the resilience of cities. This geographical and statistical study on residential vacancies is situated in Finland, where empty homes may also keep using energy and producing emissions. The research material consists of a vast dataset of all residential buildings with vacancies in Finland in mid-2014, a total of 275 486 buildings with 1 100 267 occupied and 378 802 unoccupied dwellings (52% of the Finnish housing stock). The paper shows several characteristics that increase the understanding of vacancies and their role in the dynamics of the building stock. Public policy should address the issue of vacancy, not only because of social and economic implications but also because of its environmental impacts and opportunities.
33-3813
Building stock. Indicators. Mining. Resource conservation. Urban areas.
The building sector consumes large quantities of resources and generates high levels of construction and demolition (C&D) waste. From an ‘urban mining’ perspective, the building stock can be seen as a repository of natural resources. In order to manage this repository, evidence is needed on its quantity and dynamics. Although data exist for domestic buildings, little evidence exists for non-domestic buildings. A new method is presented to quantify the material stock of non-domestic buildings – based on the German building stock. The quantification process involves three steps: (1) material composition indicators (MCIs) are calculated with respect to various building types; (2) the country’s total floor space is estimated and disaggregated; and (3) the total material stock is calculated. The main results are MCIs and the floor space for both domestic and non-domestic stocks, as well as the material mass in total. In Germany the total material mass of non-domestic buildings is approximately 6.8 billion tonnes, accounting for 44% of the entire building stock. The method can be adapted and validated for use in other countries. These results will assist both policy-makers and the construction industry to understand the potential for moving toward a more circular economy.
33-3814
China. Economic incentives. Energy conservation. Governance. Regulation.
Under the city–countryside dual structure, the existing building governance system in China differentiates between urban and rural areas. When updating building regulations and related policies to meet challenges in the built environment, it is essential to develop different strategies for different locations according to local circumstances, requirements and capabilities. Based on two research projects, this article examines the mechanisms and strategies for promoting building energy conservation in rural China from the perspective of economic governance. The challenges and potentials of building energy conservation in rural China are analyzed. The essence of the governance paradigm is briefly reviewed. A three-level analysis framework is developed in which markets, governments and the third party (professionals and others) play complementary roles in regulating stakeholders’ behaviour. A key question addressed is how to create a favourable institutional environment in which people are willing to do the right things. Different strategy portfolios are proposed for different levels, including technology strategy, financing strategy, as well as regulations and incentive policies. In conclusion, there is no ‘best’ but rather the ‘most suitable’ approach to building governance. In this light, the principle of discriminating alignment and the multilevel analysis approach provides conceptual insights.
33-3815
Building performance. Buildings. Energy planning. Governance. Performance. Regulation.
Current practices show that the goals of energy saving and CO2 reductions for creating an energy-neutral building stock can only be reached by strict and supportive governmental policies. In Europe the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) are driving forces for member states to develop and strengthen energy performance regulations both for new buildings (via building approval procedures) and the existing building stock (via energy performance certificates or labels). The effectiveness of these current governance instruments and their impact on actual CO2 reductions are found to be inadequate for ensuring actual (not hypothecated) energy performance is achieved. To realize the very ambitious energy-saving goals a radical rethink of regulatory systems and instruments is necessary. Building performance and the behaviour of the occupants is not well understood by policy-makers. Alternative forms of governance are needed that have more impact on the actual outcomes. Supportive governance to stimulate near-zero renovations in combination with performance guarantees is a promising approach. Furthermore, engagement with occupant practices and behaviours is needed. To ensure accurate outcomes-based governance, a better understanding of building performance and behaviours of occupants must be incorporated.
31-6 ENERGY SYSTEMS PLANNING
33-3816
Behavior. Energy consumption. Energy efficiency. Energy policy. Motivation. Policy planning.
Energy policy tools aimed at achieving energy savings for buildings have often yielded less than the predicted savings. One reason for these results is that the design of these tools often neglects the actions and behaviours of the building occupants, and focuses more on the cost and ease of implementation. This research highlights the importance of identifying the diverse characteristics of occupants that significantly contribute to environmental problems, and the factors that make sustainable behavioural patterns attractive. A multilevel intervention strategy tailored to various occupants’ characteristics to produce and maintain large-scale energy savings for buildings over time is proposed. To achieve this, the framework adopts a motivation/opportunity/ability (MOA) approach from the consumer and social marketing fields, where intervention strategies can be regarded as advertisements enticing the building occupants to adopt certain energy-use characteristics. The conceptual framework involves: measuring occupants’ pre- and post-intervention exposure MOA level and energy-use profiles; clustering occupants based on identified characteristics; and accordingly choose energy-efficiency intervention strategies. The results of a case study of an actual building highlight the capabilities of the proposed framework in the selection of effective intervention strategies to achieve the required energy reductions.
32. Environment
32-1 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
33-3817
Australia. Carbon dioxide. Climate. Climate change. Environmental justice. Pricing. Spatial data.
Recent years have seen significant academic attention to conceptualizing climate justice and how its ideas might be mobilized in political debates on climate policy. This article contributes to these debates by advancing two arguments. The first concerns the need for greater examination of how climate justice coexists and competes with more established political and justice considerations during the negotiation of climate policies. I argue that distinguishing analytically between normative interpretations of climate justice and justice claims made by parties affected by climate change or by mitigation or adaptation policies provides fertile ground for deepening understanding of the multivalent and relational nature of climate justice and confronting challenges to its incorporation into climate responses. The second argument concerns the importance of exploring how proponents and opponents of climate action strive to develop “spatial anchors” for justice claims to increase their legitimacy in policy debates. Based on analysis of carbon pricing controversies in Australia, the article illustrates how supporters of carbon pricing initiatives stressed international justice issues, whereas opponents mobilized multiscalar and multivalent international, national, regional, and local justice narratives to gain traction for their arguments. The article concludes by calling for further investigation of the multivalence of climate justice and of how climate justice might be spatially represented to advance its leverage in political debates on climate policy.
33-3818
Africa. Agriculture. Ecology. Governance. Nature. Politics.
Agricultural commercialization has been slow to take hold in mountain regions throughout the world. It has been particularly limited by challenges of mechanization, transportation access, and governance. Efforts at green-revolution style development have met with persistent failures in highland sub-Saharan Africa, where agricultural systems are often finely tuned to complex and dynamic social–ecological contexts. In Rwanda, a mountainous country in east central Africa, development efforts have long aimed to transition away from largely subsistence-based production that relies on high labor input toward commercial farming systems that are rooted in capital investment for marketable goods. Since 2005, Rwanda’s land policy has become increasingly ambitious, aiming to reduce the 85 percent of households involved in agriculture to 50 percent by the year 2020. The country’s Crop Intensification Program (CIP) compels farmers to consolidate land and cultivate government-selected crops. Although state assessments have touted the productivity gains created through the CIP, others speculate that households could be losing access to crucial resources. Research from both sides, however, has focused squarely on the CIP’s immediate successes and failures without considering how households are responding to the program within the context of the complex and variable mountain environment. Drawing from political ecology and mountain geography, this article describes recent state-led agricultural commercialization in Rwanda as a partial and contested process. By analyzing complex land-use and livelihood changes, it fills an important conceptual and empirical research gap in understanding the environmental and social dynamics of the agrarian transitions of the highlands of Africa.
33-3819
Ecology. Infrastructure. Politics. Urban areas. Water. Water management. Water quality. Water supply.
This article concentrates on how hydro-social relations are differentially structured across technical experts engaged within diverse and multiple networks of institutional and bureaucratic practice and the implications this has for more inclusive forms of environmental governance and decision-making. I empirically focus on stormwater governance in Chicago and Los Angeles as a means to capture the range of geographical and institutional variations in environmental knowledge. Both cities face considerably different water resource challenges in the United States but are at the forefront of developing comprehensive and progressive urban water governance programs. In the article, I identify four visions of hydrosocial relations: hydro-reformist, hydro-managerial, hydro-rationalist, and hydro-pragmatist. Each of these represents a particular understanding of how hydrosocial relations should proceed. They all align around shared framings of integrated management and the utilization of the best available science and technology to drive decision-making. Consensus, however, masks fundamental differences among the varying groups of expertise. Differences center on the perceived effectiveness of different types of infrastructural interventions, of market and economic incentives, and the role of new institutions and rules to govern stormwater. I argue that each frame looks to structure hydrosocial relations to fit their own vision but consequently offer apolitical strategies that reduce water quality and quantity problems to their technical and hydrological components.
33-3820
Decentralization. Environmental governance. Governance. Infrastructure. Irrigation. State agencies. Water.
Despite a proliferation of programs and policies aimed at promoting local resource management, we still have limited knowledge of the conditions under which state interventions can be a supportive force in everyday aspects of common pool resource governance. This article explores growing state involvement in community-managed irrigation systems of the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh, India. Here, agriculture is dependent on water channeled from glacial streams through networks of irrigation canals that have been sustained by local traditions of collective action for centuries. In recent years, however, growing off-farm employment has shifted the center of the agrarian economy and undermined shared norms of collective resource governance, just as state institutions have increasingly identified water systems as an object of development intervention. In this article, I document how irrigation management has been incrementally reinvented through changing institutional arrangements and new infrastructural forms over the past three decades, as existing patterns of collective action have increasingly found expression by leveraging development resources of the state. To the extent that socioeconomic changes associated with broader processes of development are likely to strain commons governance systems in mountain and other regions in the coming years, such collaborative engagements between local collective management and state support systems could become increasingly prevalent. This case suggests the need for new theoretical tools to guide analysis of evolving relationship between communities and state institutions in common pool resource governance.
33-3821
Agriculture. Corporations. Econometrics. Geometrics. Supply chains. Sustainability.
Over the past several years, many of the companies collectively known as Big Food have launched ambitious programs to assess and improve the sustainability of their raw material supply chains. Fueled partly by concerns about the risks posed by climate change and other environmental problems, these efforts differ from earlier corporate food supply chain governance in that they rely more on metrics of continuous improvement than compliance with standards. They also extend beyond high-value, high-profile products to include staple ingredients such as corn and soy. These commodities are sourced through long, complex, and traditionally nontransparent supply chains, where even the biggest food companies exercise surprisingly little clout over producers. This article examines how companies contend with this problem both within their own supply chains and as members of multistakeholder initiatives. The assemblage concept not only describes the many actors, technologies, and practices now working to get certain kinds of data flowing off farms; it also highlights the relational nature of this work and the uncertainty of its outcomes. More broadly, the article points to the limits of both corporate food power and the very notion of Big Food as an explanation for how that power is wielded.
33-3822
Carbon dioxide. Climate. Climate policy. Ecosystem. Governance. Indigenous people. Nature. Planning and society.
Climate change and the associated need to decarbonize pose not just risks to cultures but potential opportunities for cultural experimentation, renewal, and economic dynamism. An Australian case of carbon mitigation through carbon farming represents a discursive tool with which indigenous groups are seeking to leverage a very distinct conceptualization of payment for ecosystem services, one that values the labor and reciprocal relationships and logic of care required to abate or sequester carbon. Inscribed with an inalienable ancestral cultural signature, the indigenous produced carbon offsets being promoted by indigenous carbon market participants represent more than a mere carbon reduction; they initiate processes of potentially enduring exchange and engagement. This carbon signature works to enrich carbon as well as embed peoples’ relations with it, with each other, and with the places from which the offset is generated. Contributing to emergent research into cultures of carbon, it is our conjecture that valorizing these relations in ethical exchanges is a potentially productive way of financing alternative approaches to environmental stewardship. The insights signal potential prospects for other marginalized cultures to appropriate, repurpose, and benefit from mainstream decarbonization strategies and participate in climate governance.
33-3823
Europe. Nature. Sovereignty.
The concept of fluid sovereignty denotes configurations of state authority in which flows of living and nonliving things, within and across borders, render insecure claims of unconditional territorial control. Loss of monopoly control of the means of violence within a territory conventionally signals weak political sovereignty. Bordering Israel (including the occupied Golan Heights) and Syria, the Hasbani Basin in southern Lebanon seems to exemplify such sovereign failings: Over decades, rival security providers have provoked political instability and conflict in the region. Fluid sovereignty, however, brings to the fore state–nature relations neglected in scholarship on “fragile” or “failing” states. Informed by geographical work on hybrid sovereignties and vital materialism, we show how sovereign claims over the Hasbani Basin extend to (sub)terranean water sources and rainfall-dependent agricultural lands, both of which are deeply securitized. Incomplete centralization and territorialization by Lebanon of the Hasbani Basin evinces fractured state nature—the inability of the state to realize volumetric control of, and authority over, basin waters. This state nature is coproduced by the fluid materiality of the waters themselves, whose hydroclimatic circulation and contingencies are at odds with territorial designs for volumetric control. For rural communities in the Hasbani Basin economically dependent on access to agricultural water, field research reveals a practical experience of fluid sovereignty, both in adapting to water variability and also in navigating use of agricultural borderlands subject to conflict-related dangers. Recent conflict spillovers from the Syrian war have reinforced, for the majority Druze population, the low legitimacy of Lebanese state nature.
33-3824
Agriculture. Cropping intensity. Deforestation. Environmental governance. Territory.
Since 2004, annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen nearly 80 percent, even as agricultural production in the region has increased. Understanding this land use transition requires a theorization of the relationships among environmental governance, agricultural intensification, and state building. Drawing on key informant interviews, municipal-level case studies, and an organizational ethnography of an international environmental organization, I argue that declines in deforestation engineered by new governance arrangements are part of a project of economic development and state building through environmental regulation. This project is implemented by a complex of government, nongovernmental, and corporate actors. I describe the emergence of this complex and the land sparing logic that animates it. Land sparing policy inverts previous logics of state territorialization and environmental conservation with the aim of shifting the Amazonian economy from an extensive mode of extraction to an intensive mode of production. Two municipal case studies follow variation in land sparing policy implementation. The cases identify determinants of land sparing policy effectiveness and collateral effects, including tendencies toward agro-industrial consolidation at the expense of smallholders.
33-3825
China. Networks. Water. Water management.
The standard approach to China’s environmental management, fragmented authoritarianism, assumes the existence of state, corporations, farmers, and consumers. New social actors now populate the Chinese landscape, however. One such actor is the network we call the China water machine; others comprise the networks and coalitions that oppose the China water machine’s operations. These actors play out their operations and conflicts within socioenvironmental regions like Yunnan. All three (China water machine, oppositional groups, and socioenvironmental regions) are interpreted as assemblages. After contrasting assemblage and the hydrosocial cycle, the article demonstrates how assemblage theory can guide empirical research, by describing the emergence of the China water machine, its membership, and its effects. This machine involves corporations, universities, international institutions, and arms of the government, tasked with identifying and framing what are water management issues, formulating standardized procedures for tackling those issues, and then constructing solutions. These cooperative activities of government and other actors cannot be identified as “Chinese,” as they partly depend on institutions and corporations domiciled outside China; together they render the standard theory incomplete.
32-2 ENVIRONMENTAL MODELING
33-3826
Agriculture. Alternative fuels. Cropping intensity. Energy demand. Land use.
Abandoned cropland (ACL) is often cited as a land resource on which to produce energy crops while reducing the negative impacts of broad-scale energy crop production; for example, carbon emissions from land-cover change and competition with food production. In contrast to marginal land, which refers to a set of biophysical and economic criteria usually imposed by experts or policymakers, the designation of ACL refers to a land-use decision by a land owner. As such, ACL is argued to be a more appropriate indication of land availability for dedicated energy crop production. Prevailing estimates of ACL in the United States vary widely due to inconsistent treatment of land-use conversions away from cropland and overreliance on remote sensing methods that measure land cover, even though ACL is a category of land use. This article develops and applies a replicable and flexible methodology to estimate available abandoned cropland (AACL) at the county level in the United States, which accounts for conversion of ACL to forest cover, urban development, or permanent pasture. Estimates of AACL are derived for two scenarios: (1) land abandoned between 1978 and 2012, which excludes lands with meaningful forest regrowth, and (2) land abandoned between 2007 and 2012, which corresponds to land-use constraints imposed by the Renewable Fuel Standard. Results show that 15.0 and 4.9 Mha of AACL exist in the United States in the two scenarios, respectively, amounting to between only 3 and 8 percent of total light-duty gasoline consumption in the United States. The policy implications of these findings and the need for future research are discussed.
33-3827
Biodiversity. Ecology. Nature. Plants. Wildfires.
A network of eight Holocene paleoenvironmental records from lakes in the Klamath Mountains of Northern California provides insights on how diverse coniferous forests are maintained in the face of climate change. Pollen data suggest that in most cases plants kept pace with climate change. The steep costal-to-inland precipitation gradient resulted in asynchronous responses to climate change with coastal forests responding before inland sites. This was likely due to the proximity to oceans, warm valleys, and the differential responses to changes in ocean upwelling. Plants growing on soils with heavy metals showed little response to Holocene climate variability, suggesting that they experienced stability during the Holocene, which helps explain the localized plant diversity on the harsh soils. Plant communities on soils without heavy metals adjusted their ranges along elevational gradients in response to climate change, however. Fires were a common occurrence at all sites and tracked climate; however, sites that were more coastal experienced fewer fires than inland sites. Fire severity remained similar through the Holocene at individual sites; however, it was low to moderate at southern locations and higher at more northern locations. The article highlights historical factors that help explain the diversity of plant species in the forests of Northern California and provides insights for managing these complex ecosystems.
33-3828
Environment. Equity. Geographic information systems. Resources. Urban areas.
Urban living environments are known to influence human well-being and health. The literature on environmental equity focuses especially on the distribution of nuisances and resources, which, because of the unequal spatial distribution of different social groups, leads to an increased exposure to risks or to less access to beneficial elements for certain populations. Little work has been done on the multidimensionality of different environmental burdens and the lack of resources in some urban environments. This article has two main objectives. The first objective is to construct an environmental equity index that takes into consideration seven components of the urban environment (traffic-related pollutants, proximity to major roads and highways, vegetation, access to parks, access to supermarkets, and the urban heat island effect). The second objective is to determine whether groups vulnerable to different nuisances—namely, individuals under fifteen years old and the elderly—and those who tend to be located in the most problematic areas according to the environmental justice literature (i.e., visible minorities and low-income populations) are affected by environmental inequities associated with the application of the composite index at the city block level. The results obtained by using four statistical techniques show that, on the Island of Montreal, low-income persons and, to a lesser extent, visible minorities are more frequently located in city blocks close to major roads and with higher concentrations of NO2 and less vegetation. Finally, the environmental equity index is significantly lower in areas with high concentrations of low-income populations in comparison with the wealthiest areas.
33-3829
Capital accumulation. Ecology. Nature. Social conditions.
In this article, and the companion piece that follows, we develop an account of the socioecological fix. Our concern is to explore the ways in which crises of capitalist overaccumulation might be displaced through spatial fixes that result in the production of nature. We review Harvey’s theory of the spatial fix, with emphasis on his model of capital switching, noting that the socioecological implications of the diversion of fixed capital into the built environment have been insufficiently developed by Harvey and others. We invoke Smith’s writings on the production of nature to help fill this lacuna but note that Smith did not discuss the spatial fix vis-à-vis the production of nature explicitly. Moreover, neither Harvey nor Smith emphasized the role of political struggle and contestation as internal to the formation of spatial fixes and the production of nature, respectively. We draw on O’Connor’s theory of ecological contradiction along with Katz and other feminist political economists who emphasized the systemic tension between the reproduction of capitalism and social reproduction more broadly, including as this pertains to the production and possible “underproduction” of nature. Our overall project is to develop an account of the socioecological fix as a way of linking capitalist crises, capital switching, and fixed capital formation with socioenvironmental transformations. Although we argue that any spatial fix has socioecological dimensions, we contend that making these connections explicit and rigorous is crucial at the current conjuncture.
33-3830
Change. Environment. Human resources. Regions.
The special issues of the Annals allow the editors to highlight themes of international significance that showcase the breadth and depth of geography in a format accessible to a broad array of readers. This ninth special issue of the Annals of the AAG focuses on mountains. The understanding of mountain environments and peoples has been a focus of individual geographers for centuries and for the organized discipline of geography for more than a century; more recently, the geographical interest in mountain regions among researchers has been growing rapidly. The articles contained within are from a wide spectrum of researchers from different parts of the world who address physical, political, theoretical, social, empirical, environmental, methodological, and economic issues focused on the geography of mountains and their inhabitants. The articles in this special issue are organized into three themed sections with very loose boundaries between themes: (1) physical dynamics of mountain environments, (2) coupled human–physical dynamics, and (3) sociocultural dynamics in mountain regions.
33-3831
Contingent valuation. Models. Natural resources. Values. Willingness to pay.
Natural resources are often victims of development. On the one hand, a freeway is under construction, while on the other hand there are unique natural resources along the route of the freeway. Both of them are essential to us. Thus, we cannot ignore either of them. The purpose of this study is to find the monetary equivalent of the natural resources in response to a challenge between environment and development. Dealing with non-use values, we apply the contingent valuation method (CVM). Our results show that the mean of willingness to pay (WTP) is US$1.84 per household for supporting natural resources along the route of the freeway. Total WTP for supporting natural resources along the route of the freeway is US$77 million annually. The findings indicate that Iranian people have a high sensitivity for supporting natural resources along the route of the freeway. Hence, the government should give more attention to natural resources along the freeway and change its route.
33-3832
Climate. Climate change. Environmental modeling. Local autonomy. Models.
Peru is facing imminent water resource issues as glaciers retreat and demand for water increases, yet limited observations and model resolution hamper understanding of hydrometerological processes on local to regional scales. Much of current global and regional climate studies neglect the meteorological forcing of lapse rates (LRs) and valley and slope wind dynamics on critical components of the Peruvian Andes’ water cycle, and herein we emphasize the wet season. In 2004 and 2005 we installed an autonomous sensor network (ASN) within the glacierized Llanganuco Valley, Cordillera Blanca (9 S), consisting of discrete, cost-effective, automatic temperature loggers located along the valley axis and anchored by two automatic weather stations. Comparisons of these embedded hydrometeorological measurements from the ASN and climate modeling by dynamical downscaling using the Weather Research and Forecasting model elucidate distinct diurnal and seasonal characteristics of the mountain wind regime and LRs. Wind, temperature, humidity, and cloud simulations suggest that thermally driven up-valley and slope winds converging with easterly flow aloft enhance late afternoon and evening cloud development, which helps explain nocturnal wet season precipitation maxima measured by the ASN. Furthermore, the extreme diurnal variability of along-valley-axis LR and valley wind detected from ground observations and confirmed by dynamical downscaling demonstrate the importance of realistic scale parameterizations of the atmospheric boundary layer to improve regional climate model projections in mountainous regions.
33-3833
Environmental modeling. Nature. Water.
Although mountains represent a barrier to the flow of liquid water across our planet and an Earth of impenetrable mountains would have produced a very different geography, many rivers do cross mountain ranges. These transverse drainages cross mountains through one of four general mechanisms: antecedence—the river maintains its course during mountain building (orogeny); superimposition—a river erodes across buried bedrock atop erodible sediment or sedimentary rock, providing a route across what later becomes an exhumed mountain range; piracy or capture—where a steeper gradient path captures a lower gradient drainage across a low relief interfluve; and overflow—a basin fills with sediment and water, ultimately breaching the lowest sill to create a new river. This article reviews research that aids in identifying the mechanism responsible for a transverse drainage, notes a major misconception about the power of headward eroding streams that has dogged scholarship, and examines the transverse drainage at the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
33-3834
Arid regions. China. Climate.
Atmospheric particulate matter (PM 2.5 and PM 10) can adversely affect human health and also has impacts on climate and precipitation. Much research has been done on the transport of human-made fine-grained matter in modern times. It is still unclear, though, what controls the transport process of fine-grained sediment from natural sources on the millennial scale. In this study, we present Holocene basin-wide fine-grained sediment records from the Shiyang River drainage basin system in arid China. Six Holocene sedimentary sequences were collected from various geomorphological units of the drainage system. A total of 1,043 sediment samples were obtained for analysis of fine-grained sediment; fifty-eight radiocarbon dates were acquired for establishing the geochronological frames. In addition, we synthesized the results from transient paleo-climate simulations to understand environmental backgrounds of the Holocene. Our records and simulations indicated that fine-grained sediment 2.5 µm content was relatively stable and less affected by monsoon intensities and circulations. Millennial-scale fine-grained sediment 10 µm content varied according to sedimentary facies, and it was negatively correlated with the winter monsoon intensity at eolian sediments. The fine-grained sediment 10 µm content increases dramatically at lacustrine layers in lake and alluvial sediments from the middle and lower drainage basin, showing its relationship with long-term moisture conditions that are closely related to monsoon precipitation based on climate simulations. This finding contributes to our understanding of the fine-grained matter trends against the backdrop of global warming.
33-3835
Climate change. Environment. Nature.
The linkage between glacier change and climate has garnered significant attention in recent decades, but little is known about the role of local geomorphometric factors on glacier changes since the Little Ice Age (LIA), approximately 100 to 700 years ago. This study examines the spatial pattern of changes in glacier area in the eastern Tien Shan based on geomorphological mapping of LIA glacial extents and contemporary glaciers from the Second Glacier Inventory of China. Partial least squares regression was applied to examine the correlations between geomorphometric factors, including glacier area, slope, aspect, shape, elevation, and hypsometry, and relative glacier area loss, both in the whole area and in three subregions (the Boro-Eren Range, the Bogda Range, and the Karlik Range). Our results show that the area of 640 mapped LIA glaciers decreased from 791.6 ± 18.7 km2 to 483.9 ± 31.2 km2 between 2006 and 2010, a loss of 38.9 ± 2.7 percent. The losses for three subregions are 43.4 ± 3.2 percent, 35.9 ± 2.4 percent, and 30.2 ± 1.8 percent, respectively. Elevation, slope, and area of a glacier are the three most significant geomorphometric factors to glacier area change, at both regional and subregional scales. The west–east decreasing trend of glacier retreat and different variances explained in subregional regressions might reflect the influence from the shifting dominance of the westerlies and the Siberian High.
33-3836
Environmental justice. Hazards. Health. Multilevel models. Spatial model.
Environmental pollution is a major problem in China, subjecting people to significant health risk. Surprisingly little is known, though, about how these risks are distributed spatially or socially. Drawing on a large-scale survey conducted in Beijing in 2013, we examine how environmental hazards and health, as perceived by residents, are distributed at a fine (subdistrict) scale in urban Beijing and investigate the association between hazards, health, and geographical context. A Bayesian spatial multilevel logistic model is developed to account for spatial dependence in unobserved contextual influences (neighborhood effects) on health. The results reveal robust associations between exposure to environmental hazards and health. A unit decrease on a five-point Likert scale in exposure is associated with increases of 15.2 percent (air pollution), 17.5 percent (noise), and 9.3 percent (landfills) in the odds of reporting good health, with marginal groups including migrant workers reporting greater exposure. Health inequality is also evident and is associated with age, income, educational attainment, and housing characteristics. Geographical context (neighborhood features like local amenities) also plays a role in shaping the social distribution of health inequality. The results are discussed in the context of developing environmental justice policy within a Chinese social market system that experiences tension between its egalitarian roots and its pragmatic approach to tackling grand public policy challenges.
33-3837
Geography. Scales. Species diversity. Vegetation.
Alpine plant communities vary, and their environmental covariates could influence their response to climate change. A single multilevel model of how alpine plant community composition is determined by hierarchical relations is compared to a separate examination of those relations at different scales. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling of species cover for plots in four regions across the Rocky Mountains created dependent variables. Climate variables are derived for the four regions from interpolated data. Plot environmental variables are measured directly and the presence of thirty-seven site characteristics is recorded and used to create additional independent variables. Multilevel and best subsets regressions are used to determine the strength of the hypothesized relations. The ordinations indicate structure in the assembly of plant communities. The multilevel analyses, although revealing significant relations, provide little explanation; of the site variables, those related to site microclimate are most important. In multiscale analyses (whole and separate regions), different variables are better explanations within the different regions. This result indicates weak environmental niche control of community composition. The weak relations of the structure in the patterns of species association to the environment indicates that either alpine vegetation represents a case of the neutral theory of biogeography being a valid explanation or that it represents disequilibrium conditions. The implications of neutral theory and disequilibrium explanations are similar: Response to climate change will be difficult to quantify above equilibrium background turnover.
33-3838
City planning. Flooding. Floods. Statistical analysis.
Precipitation design values, which describe precipitation extremes expected within a specified time period, provide critical guidance for public policy and the design of hydrologic infrastructure. Unfortunately, conventional design value calculations are limited by a major assumption: They treat precipitation as a point-based phenomenon, measured at spatially isolated gauges. We argue that because precipitation occurs over areas, design value calculations should be based on an areal conception of precipitation. Using spatially dense Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) Network data in two Colorado cities (Fort Collins and Boulder), we develop a “hyperlocal” design value calculation in which nearby observations within a representative precipitation region (RPR) “compete” to capture a single twenty-four-hour maximum. We find that design values for shorter return periods (one to fifty years) derived from just ten years of hyperlocal data, which we express as probabilistic distributions rather than single values, typically exceed those calculated using single-point records of 100 years or more. Hyperlocal design values for longer return periods (more than fifty years) are generally smaller than those calculated from the single-point data due to the temporally limited CoCoRaHS record. We also find that the dependence of design values on RPR size contrasts between Fort Collins and Boulder, as design values grow markedly larger as the RPR size increases in Fort Collins but not in Boulder. We attribute this behavior to the Boulder Global Historical Climatology Network station’s location in a topographically favored area for precipitation and propose that future studies evaluate the hyperlocal design value method in a variety of geographic settings.
33-3839
Climate. Climate change. Climate policy. Environmental modeling. Science and technology.
Avalanche climatology is defined as the study of the relationships between climate and snow avalanches, and it contributes in aiding avalanche hazard mitigation efforts. The field has evolved over the past six decades concerning methodology, data monitoring and field collection, and interdisciplinary linkages. Avalanche climate research directions are also expanding concerning treatment in both spatial scale and temporal timescales. This article provides an overview of the main themes of avalanche climate research in issues of scale from local to global, its expanding interdisciplinary nature, as well as its future challenges and directions. The growth of avalanche climatology includes themes such as its transformation from being mostly descriptive to innovative statistical methods and modeling techniques, new challenges in microscale efforts that include depth hoar aspects and increased field studies, expanding synoptic climatology applications on studying avalanche variations, efforts to reconstruct past avalanches and relate them to climatic change, and research on potential avalanche responses to recent twentieth-century and future global warming. Some suggestions on future avalanche climatology research directions include the expansion of data networks and studies that include lesser developed countries, stronger linkages of avalanche climate studies with GIScience and remote sensing applications, more innovative linkages of avalanches with climate and societal applications, and increased emphases on modeling and process-oriented approaches.
33-3840
Climate. Climate change. Disaster. Natural disasters.
Precipitation variability in tropical high mountains is a fundamental yet poorly understood factor influencing local climatic expression and a variety of environmental processes, including glacier behavior and water resources. Precipitation type, diurnality, frequency, and amount influence hydrological runoff, surface albedo, and soil moisture, whereas cloud cover associated with precipitation events reduces solar irradiance at the surface. Considerable uncertainty remains in the multiscale atmospheric processes influencing precipitation patterns and their associated regional variability in the tropical Andes—particularly related to precipitation phase, timing, and vertical structure. Using data from a variety of sources—including new citizen science precipitation stations; new high-elevation comprehensive precipitation monitoring stations at Chacaltaya, Bolivia, and the Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru; and a vertically pointing Micro Rain Radar—this article synthesizes findings from interdisciplinary research activities in the Cordillera Real of Bolivia and the Cordillera Vilcanota of Peru related to the following two research questions: (1) How do the temporal patterns, moisture source regions, and El Niño-Southern Oscillation relationships with precipitation occurrence vary? (2) What is the vertical structure (e.g., reflectivity, Doppler velocity, melting layer heights) of tropical Andean precipitation and how does it evolve temporally? Results indicate that much of the heavy precipitation occurs at night, is stratiform rather than convective in structure, and is associated with Amazonian moisture influx from the north and northwest. Improving scientific understanding of tropical Andean precipitation is of considerable importance to assessing climate variability and change, glacier behavior, hydrology, agriculture, ecosystems, and paleoclimatic reconstructions.
33-3841
Climate. Climate change. Climate policy.
Guatemala’s population is dependent on cash crops and subsistence agriculture, the yield of which depends on both the timing and quantity of rainfall. Detailed knowledge about Guatemala’s past, current, and future climate is therefore critical to the well-being of a country so reliant on agriculture. Relatively little information about Guatemala’s climate exists, though, due to sparse instrumental records and limited high-resolution paleoclimate data. Given this situation, the development of climate data is the necessary first step toward facilitating improved decision making and robust adaptation in the face of predicted future climate change. Here we document how we successfully used tree rings to produce an annually resolved paleoclimate record from Guatemala stretching back to the late seventeenth century. These data provide a more comprehensive understanding of the range of natural variability in local and regional hydroclimate. This increased understanding could then be used to generate locally relevant climate information, to assist in planning, and toward reducing climate-related vulnerability at regional to local scales in agriculturally dependent communities. Our goal herein is to begin to close the gap between climate data generation and the use of relevant agrometeorological information in Guatemala by identifying key participants, decision makers, and modes of stakeholder engagement that are critical to coproduce climate information in the mountain regions of Guatemala.
33-3842
Critical geographic information systems. Cultural landscapes. Nature.
More than most other landforms, mountains have been at the vanguard of geographical inquiry. Whether promontories, cultural works on slopes, or even metaphorical/spiritual heights, mountain research informs current narratives of global environmental change. We review how montology shifts geographic paradigms via the novel approach of critical biogeography in the Andes. We use it to bridge nature and society through indigenous heritage, local biodiversity conservation narratives, and vernacular nature–culture hybrids of biocultural landscapes (BCLs), focusing on how socioecological systems (SES) enlighten scientific query in the Andes. In our Andean study cases, integrated critical frameworks guide the understanding of BCLs as the product of long-term human–environment interactions. With situated exemplars from place naming, wild edible plants, medicinal plants, sacred trees, foodstuffs, ritualistic plants, and floral and faunal causation, we convey the need for cognition of mountains as BCLs in the Anthropocene. We conclude that applied montology allows for a multi-method approach with the four Cs of critical biogeography, a model that engages forward-looking geographers and interdisciplinary Andeanists in assessments for sustainable development of fragile BCLs in the Andes.
33-3843
Alcohol abuse. Climate. United States.
Michigan daily climatic data and seasonal vine performance and phenological data (budburst timing) were analyzed to establish relationships between temperature (e.g., growing degree days or GDD) and juice grape yield and quality in Vitis labrusca grapevines. In viticultural regions such as Michigan, early season vine growth is highly important: Vines coming out of their winter dormancy need to withstand any potential bud-killing frosts after budburst. The temperatures during the months of March, April, and May are highly variable from year to year in Michigan, however. The average GDD accumulation at the time of budburst (average date is 27 April) from 1971 to 2011 was 158 (base 10°C) with a coefficient of variation of 45 percent. Seasonal GDD deficit or surplus at the midpoint of a growing season (as compared to an average year) was correlated to grapevine performance and the accumulation of GDD on a yearly basis was found to occur at a highly variable rate. Early season GDD accumulation was found to be a relative indicator of the end season total, where an early season deficit (or surplus) was able to predict whether the season would still be in deficit (or surplus) at the end of 80.5 percent of all seasons studied. Finally, a statistical model based on historical temperature data was created to calculate the date of budburst. Michigan’s warming trend will likely continue in the future, which should bring positive effects to the region. Early season variability and post-budburst frosts are likely to still be a concern in the near future, however.
33-3844
Asia. Environmental governance. Forestry. Production.
In much of Southeast Asia, agroforestry and related forms of tree cropping have been vigorously promoted within community-based forest management (CBFM) to discourage extensive resource uses among upland peoples. Although critical scholars have scrutinized CBFM initiatives, how and why agroforestry has emerged as a concept, strategy, and practice in changing forest governance regimes remains underexplored. Integrating assemblage approaches and coproduction, we explore how certain environmental framings are stabilized within agroforestry projects to achieve outcomes as part of increasingly post-territorial forest management in the Philippines. We do so by focusing on how the Palawan Tropical Forestry Protection Programme (PTFPP, 1995–2002)—a prominent European Union–funded forest management project on Palawan Island—extensively promoted market-oriented agroforestry as a means to arrest forest degradation and provide cash income to indigenous uplanders. We describe how PTFPP livelihood projects aimed to reform indigenous peoples’ values of forest resources by foregrounding tree planting as an economically and morally ideal practice and, in doing so, limit the range, mobility, and perceived impact of swidden (kaingin) by “rooting” agriculture in place. Building on the historical analysis of policy documents, we use ethnographic fieldwork among upland swiddeners in southern Palawan to explore the practice and outcome of the PTFPP as an incremental coproduction of varied knowledges and space brokered by project officials, customary leaders, and farmers themselves. We conclude by showing how seemingly apolitical tree-based interventions could produce conservation objectives, such as the sedenterization of upland famers, in the absence of strict territorial boundaries.
33-3845
Ecosystem. Monitoring. Regionalism.
The productivity and phenology of vegetation are spatially and temporally variable ecosystem functions. Monitoring spatial–temporal patterns in these functions can improve our understanding of global change and natural ecosystem variability and inform management actions. Researchers typically focus on temporal changes within or among static regions and omit dynamics of spatial configuration. Our goal was to assess global spatial–temporal variability in productivity and phenology regimes between 2000 and 2012 using a temporally dynamic functional type classification. Fourteen functional types were defined for each year by clustering the annual sum and annual variability (seasonality) of the fraction of photosynthetically active radiation (fPAR)—a biophysical proxy for vegetation greenness or productivity—from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS). The fourteen functional types ranged from tundra (low cumulative fPAR and highly seasonal) to tropical forests (high cumulative fPAR and low seasonality). Variability in the mean of the fPAR metrics and in two spatial pattern metrics was assessed for each functional type. Many pixels changed from one cluster to another then back again, suggesting considerable short-term variability. Temporal variability in the mean of the fPAR metrics was relatively low, with changes instead primarily manifested in spatial pattern. Spatial pattern was most variable within tundra, grasslands, shrublands, and savannas. A dynamic classification demonstrated the variability in spatial patterns of primary productivity and can be used for future monitoring.
33-3846
Animals. Geographical analysis. Sustainability.
The dzud are extreme weather events in Mongolia of deep snow, severe cold, or other conditions that render forage unavailable or inaccessible, which in turn results in extensive livestock deaths. Mongolia is economically vulnerable to extreme events due to an increase in nonprofessional herders and the livestock population, brought about by a deregularized industry. Thus, it is hugely informative to try to understand the spatial and temporal trends of livestock population change. To this end, annual livestock census data are exploited and a geographically weighted principal component analysis (GWPCA) is applied to goat data recorded from 1990 to 2012 in 341 regions. This application of GWPCA to temporal data is novel and is able to account for both temporal and spatial patterns in goat population change. Furthermore, the GWPCA methodology is extended to simultaneously optimize the number of components to retain and the kernel bandwidth. In doing so, this study not only advances the GWPCA method but provides a useful insight into the spatiotemporal variations of the Mongolian goat population.
33-3847
Climate change. Ecological planning. Land use changes. Nature. Recession.
Examination of the dynamism of snowlines and treelines could provide insights into environmental change processes affecting land cover in the tropical Andes Mountains. Further, land cover at these ecotones represents a powerful lens through which to monitor and understand ecological processes across biophysical gradients while acknowledging their socioenvironmental dimensions. To illustrate this approach, we draw on recent research from two sites in the high tropical Andes where, at the regional scale, land cover assessments document retreating glaciers and changing amounts of forest cover, even though steep topographic gradients impose spatial shifts at much finer scales. Our results show that heterogeneous patterns of glacier recession open up new ecological spaces for plant colonization, potentially forming new grasslands, shrublands, and wetlands. In addition, treeline shifts are tied to changes in woody plant dominance, which can vary in rate and pattern as a result of aspect, past land use, and current livelihoods. We suggest that the telecoupling of regional and global biophysical and socioeconomic drivers of land use and land cover change to specific landscape combinations of elevation, aspect, and slope position might explain much of the spatial heterogeneity that characterizes landscape stasis and flux in mountains.
33-3848
Biodiversity. Ecology. Environment. Food. Food industry. Geography. Remoteness. Sustainability.
We use an original geographic framework and insights from science, technology, and society studies and the geohumanities to investigate the development of global environmental knowledge in tropical mountains. Our analysis demonstrates the significant relationship between current agrobiodiversity and the elevation of mountain agroecosystems across multiple countries. We use the results of this general statistical model to support our focus on mountain agrobiodiversity. Regimes of the agrobiodiversity knowledge of scientists, government officials, travelers, and indigenous peoples, among others, interacting in mountain landscapes have varied significantly in denoting geographic remoteness. Knowledge representing pre-European mountain geography and diverse food plants in the tropical Andes highlighted their centrality to the Inca Empire (circa 1400–1532). The notion of semiremoteness, geographic valley–upland differentiation, and the similitude-and-difference knowledge mode characterized early Spanish imperial rule (1532–1770). Early modern accounts (1770–1900) amplified the remoteness of the Andes as they advanced global ecological sciences, knowledge standardization, and racial representations of indigenous people as degraded, with scant attention to Andean agriculture and food. Global agrobiodiversity knowledge increasingly drew on corresponding representations of mountain remoteness. Our integration of the biogeophysical–social sciences with the geohumanities reveals distinctive geographies of agrobiodiversity knowledge. Assumed remoteness of mountain agrobiodiversity is not inherent but rather is actively formed in relation to global societies and knowledge systems and is thus relational. Connectivity and claims to territorial and indigenous autonomy distinguish newly emergent characteristics of agrobiodiversity. The multifunctionality and political geography of agrobiodiversity are integral to current mountain environments, societies, and sustainability.
32-3 ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING
33-3849
Africa. Infrastructure. Irrigation. Maintenance. State agencies.
Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure comprises a vast network of dams, canals, offtakes, and ditches, which direct water from the Nile throughout the Nile Valley and Delta to millions of farmers who rely on that water to cultivate their land. In this paper, I focus on the vital work of maintenance, which keeps this infrastructure functioning and the water flowing. Yet rather than taking maintenance as an inherent good, I look critically at what exactly is being maintained. I contrast two forms of canal maintenance: first, the work that Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation conducts, mostly during an annual maintenance period; second, the maintenance that farmers conduct on an everyday basis. State-led maintenance, I argue, is as much about reasserting state authority over the irrigation system as it is about fixing problems within the system. The unsung maintenance of irrigation ditches by farmers, on the other hand, is not only about cleaning ditches but also building communal relations among farmers that are key to the delivery of the water on which they depend. Focusing attention on the decision-making processes around maintenance reveals the variegated outcomes of this work and how it maintains not only the material but also social order.
33-3850
Climate. Climate change. Environment. Geography. History. United States.
The American West has been the proving ground for a number of earth sciences, including the study of glaciers. From their discovery by Western science in the late 1800s and continuing to the present day, studies of these glaciers have made important contributions to our understanding of glacial processes and to the recent assessments of global sea level rise. The growth of this science was founded on the interplay between trained scientists and dedicated nonprofessionals. This report summarizes the early history of glacier discovery and explorations in the West.
33-3851
Environmental management. Ground water. Land. Planning.
In recent decades, governments have developed better knowledge of groundwater and established measures to protect and preserve it. In the hope of protecting this resource and ensuring its sustainability, the Government of Quebec has launched a programme to characterise groundwater in the southern portion of the province. Prior to launching this programme, pilot projects were carried out in two watersheds to produce groundwater atlases. However, the producers of the atlases are under the impression that their documents remain unused by municipal and county planners. The main objective of this study is to propose strategies to facilitate the incorporation of groundwater data into land planning processes. This paper presents the results of a series of semi-directed interviews with land planning stakeholders in the Province of Quebec. The study proposes four actions to improve the use of groundwater information in land planning: an awareness-raising campaign for all citizens, basic training on groundwater for land planning stakeholders, a legal framework defining who should protect groundwater and how, and a GIS tool that would help planners interpret the data.
33-3853
Adaptation. Adaptation strategies. Climate change. Environmental planning. Natural resources. Water.
Glaciers, snowpack, rivers, lakes, and wetlands in mountain regions provide freshwater for much of the world’s population. These systems, however, are acutely sensitive to climate change. In Andean water towers, which supply freshwater to more than 100 million people, climate change adaptation planning is critical. Adaptation plans, however, are more than just documents; they inform and are informed by sociopolitical processes with major implications for hydrosocial relations in mountain water towers. Noting the inadequate scholarly attention to climate change in relation to the hydrosocial cycle, we draw on the hydrosocial literature to examine and compare climate change adaptation plans from mountain water tower regions of Piura, Peru, and the Santiago metropolitan region in Chile. Through a hydrosocial lens, we find that these plans reinforce hydrosocial relations such as upstream–downstream disparities that tend to exclude those who access water informally, have differing ontologies of water, or have livelihoods outside of dominant economic sectors. Our analysis suggests that the Andean plans reinforce current water access patterns, missing a key opportunity to reenvision more inclusive hydrosocial relationships in the context of a changing climate. This study encourages further engagement between the climate change adaptation and hydrosocial literature within and beyond mountain water tower regions. Critical hydrosocial analysis of adaptation plans reveals gaps that must be addressed in future planning and implementation efforts if adaptation is going to provide meaningful pathways for change.
33-3854
Agriculture. Climate change. Climate policy.
Regular availability of glacier and snow meltwater is essential for irrigated crop cultivation in the northwestern Himalaya. Based on a case study from the Nanga Parbat region in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, general patterns and site-specific particularities of irrigation networks in semiarid high mountain regions are conceptualized as continuously evolving sociohydrological interactions. These interactions are shaped by an interplay of glacio-fluvial runoff, water distribution, socioeconomic setting, institutional arrangements, external development interventions, and historical trajectories. Building on the paradigm of sociohydrology that changes in water availability coevolve with socioeconomic and land use transitions, this article explores glacier fluctuations and associated developments in meltwater-dependent crop cultivation in the Rupal Valley. The evolution of irrigation networks is analyzed using multitemporal high-resolution satellite imagery, repeat photography, and primary socioeconomic data collected in successive field surveys. Changes are historically contextualized with the help of archival material such as colonial reports and cadastral maps. This integrative study discovered the extension of cultivated areas, an increase in individual field numbers, and a reduction in average field size against the background of population increase and glacier retreat. Despite socioeconomic and environmental changes, the strong coupling of the human–water system remains intact, demonstrating a high degree of persistence of sociohydrological features over time. Adaptive strategies, however, often fail in the face of unpredictable natural processes.
32-4 RISK MANAGEMENT/IMPACT ASSESSMENT
33-3855
Climate. Climate change. Environmental impact analysis. Impact. Sustainability. Water.
Glacierized mountains are often referred to as our world’s water towers because glaciers both store water over time and regulate seasonal stream flow, releasing runoff during dry seasons when societies most need water. Ice loss thus has the potential to affect human societies in diverse ways, including irrigation, agriculture, hydropower, potable water, livelihoods, recreation, spirituality, and demography. Unfortunately, research focusing on the human impacts of glacier runoff variability in mountain regions remains limited, and studies often rely on assumptions rather than concrete evidence about the effects of shrinking glaciers on mountain hydrology and societies. This article provides a systematic review of international research on human impacts of glacier meltwater variability in mountain ranges worldwide, including the Andes, Alps, greater Himalayan region, Cascades, and Alaska. It identifies four main areas of existing research: (1) socioeconomic impacts; (2) hydropower; (3) agriculture, irrigation, and food security; and (4) cultural impacts. The article also suggests paths forward for social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences research that could more accurately detect and attribute glacier runoff and human impacts, grapple with complex and intersecting spatial and temporal scales, and implement transdisciplinary research approaches to study glacier runoff. The objective is ultimately to redefine and reorient the glacier-water problem around human societies rather than simply around ice and climate. By systematically evaluating human impacts in different mountain regions, the article strives to stimulate cross-regional thinking and inspire new studies on glaciers, hydrology, risk, adaptation, and human–environment interactions in mountain regions.
33-3856
Conservation. Ecosystem. Ecosystem conservation. Landscape perception. Management.
Andean páramo grasslands have long supported human populations that depend on them as forage for livestock and, increasingly, have been recognized as critical water sources with large soil carbon stores and high levels of biodiversity. Recent conservation efforts have used payment for ecosystem services (PES) to incentivize land management that aims to enhance ecosystem services related to water, carbon, and biodiversity, as well as local livelihoods. Data to assess ecological and social outcomes of these programs are limited, however. In particular, a better understanding of how incentivized land management practices affect the local values and uses of páramos is needed. We conducted interviews with PES participants on their perceptions of the value of páramos and of management practices incentivized through PES—afforestation and removal of burning—and linked them with data on ecological outcomes of those practices. We found that local perceptions of páramo values include provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services, underpinning basic needs, security, health, and social relations. In some cases, local perceptions align with research on ecological outcomes of PES, whereas in others, expectations of PES participants are unlikely to be met. We also found examples of both synergies—where PES land management strengthens an existing páramo value—and trade-offs, in which existing benefits might be diminished. By improving understanding of how people perceive the benefits they obtain from páramos and how participation in PES is likely to affect those uses and values, our findings help connect local perceptions with ecological science to inform policy and management.
33-3857
Co-evolution. Europe. Evolution. Natural hazards. Paths.
A coevolutionary perspective is adopted to understand the dynamics of exposure to mountain hazards in the European Alps. A spatially explicit, object-based temporal assessment of elements at risk to mountain hazards (river floods, torrential floods, and debris flows) in Austria and Switzerland is presented for the period from 1919 to 2012. The assessment is based on two different data sets: (1) hazard information adhering to legally binding land use planning restrictions and (2) information on building types combined from different national-level spatial data. We discuss these transdisciplinary dynamics and focus on economic, social, and institutional interdependencies and interactions between human and physical systems. Exposure changes in response to multiple drivers, including population growth and land use conflicts. The results show that whereas some regional assets are associated with a strong increase in exposure to hazards, others are characterized by a below-average level of exposure. The spatiotemporal results indicate relatively stable hot spots in the European Alps. These results coincide with the topography of the countries and with the respective range of economic activities and political settings. Furthermore, the differences between management approaches as a result of multiple institutional settings are discussed. A coevolutionary framework widens the explanatory power of multiple drivers to changes in exposure and risk and supports a shift from structural, security-based policies toward an integrated, risk-based natural hazard management system.
33-3858
Adaptive behavior. Culture. Nature.
Mountain agriculture has been conceptualized in terms of altitudinal zones, verticality, and agroecosystems, but an alternative framework is that of adaptive dynamics, conceptualizing farming in terms of choice between options based on optimizing returns in different frameworks of rational decision making in different production zones. In this framework, production zones are not defined solely in terms of altitude but also in terms of soil, slope, and access to irrigation. A recent option in the irrigated production zone has been greenhouse floriculture, which has become one of the most globally competitive agricultural exports in equatorial mountains. In Ecuador, greenhouse floriculture expanded in the 1990s partly in response to favorable trade agreements but also due to diffusion of technologies from multiple sources and local entrepreneurship. Interviews with various actors and fieldwork provide details on greenhouse adaptive strategies and suggest that this agroindustrial activity has proven unusually resilient to changes in global trade patterns and changes in climate. It has provided an option for employment that has stemmed outmigration and encouraged some immigration of labor. At the same time, there are concerns regarding impacts on water resources and regarding pesticide impacts. Excessively static or ecosystemicist conceptions of mountain environments and agricultural strategies fail to anticipate the full range of possibilities for development in the diverse production zones of high-altitude regions. These possibilities also help to contest assertions about the inevitable decline of mountain agriculture in the face of modernization and globalization.
33-3859
Actor-network theory. Animals. Networks. Security. Vulnerability.
Vulnerability and biosecurity scholars argue for the need to analyze vulnerability to hazards as a relational process. We propose a network vulnerability assessment that fills this gap by drawing on actor-network theory, rooted networks, and an analytical framework from vulnerability literature that analyzes exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to hazards. We demonstrate how to conduct such an assessment and the value of this approach through a network vulnerability assessment of North Carolina’s hog industry to a potential foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak. This approach allows us to analyze how power-laden relationships among humans and nonhumans create and stabilize exposure routes for FMD. A relational process allows us to analyze the sensitivity of the network from the unique perspectives of different actants, from which we can see that the relationships of some can trigger the agency of others, including the FMD virus. This more-than-human analysis allows us to see that the species and breed of actants have a significant impact on the sensitivity of the network to biohazards. Understanding adaptive capacity as networked, we examine how the processes of actant rootedness and mobility shape the network’s ability to adapt to a disaster. We see that the need to circulate pigs through the network daily makes it impossible to adapt to a disaster that stops that circulation, creating tens of millions of pig bodies to dispose of. Rooted in North Carolina’s coastal plains, the network lacks the capacity to safely dispose of these bodies, creating a secondary disaster of mass water contamination.
33-3860
Climate. Climate change. Climate policy. Geography. Health. Time. Vulnerability.
Salmonella spp. are one of the most common causes of gastrointestinal illness in humans. Elevated temperatures increase Salmonella spp.’s growth rate and likelihood that the food consumer will develop a severe illness. Climate and Salmonella associations have only been reported for a few U.S. states. This study investigated associations between temperature and reported human Salmonella infections from 2006 to 2014. The study analyzed state-level relationships across the contiguous United States. States voluntarily report weekly human Salmonella cases to the Nationally Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System. Representative weather conditions were created by population weighting temperature from the North American Land Data Assimilation System. Time series analysis using generalized additive models associated temperature against Salmonella infections while controlling for temporal patterns and the size of the population at risk. The study also investigated temperature and Salmonella infection transmission thresholds. In twenty-five states, higher weekly temperatures increased reported Salmonella infections. Each degree (°C) rise in temperature increased the risk of reporting a case by 1.3 to 5.9 percent. Many of these states were located in the Southwest, east central states, Midwest and Great Plains, and Northeast regions. Only temperatures above a state-specific threshold increased cases in four states. Above each threshold, a 1°C temperature increase translated into 5.6 to 22.8 percent more cases. Weekly temperatures increased reported human Salmonella infections across a much larger portion of the United States than published research suggests. Knowledge of places and periods of time where climate increases Salmonella risk can help target surveillance and health interventions.
33-3861
Climate. Climate change. Geography. Soil. Soil contamination. United States.
Glacial forelands are harsh environments where incipient pedogenesis provides the basis for vegetation establishment and succession. The Easton Glacier foreland on Mount Baker, Washington, has till deposited during five time intervals over the last 100 years as determined from historic ground and air photos. A soil chronosequence was established on the different age surfaces to assess rates of pedogenesis. As hypothesized, all soil variables, except pH, showed increasing values on progressively older surfaces, with several orders of magnitude increase between the active till and the 100-year surface. Till on ice showed no vegetation cover, low organic matter (0.4 percent), little to no nitrogen content (maximum 0.001 percent), minimal carbon (maximum 0.0083 percent), and a carbon/nitrogen (C/N) ratio of 5.9. The 100-year-old surface has continuous vegetation cover, high organic matter (12.6 percent), 0.67 percent nitrogen, and 9.47 percent carbon, and the C/N ratio was at its highest (22.6). Organic matter content started higher than expected in fresh till and gradually increased before vegetation became established, suggesting aeolian deposition of detritus built soil fertility. We estimate that after about sixty years of exposure, till surfaces became fully covered with vegetation and soil organic matter increased by almost 2,800 percent (0.4–12.6 percent). This rapid rate of soil development, given a short growing season, is hypothesized to be related to several edaphic conditions (topographic setting relative to established vegetation, aspect, and andesitic parent material), rather than a normal condition for the Cascades Range as a whole, demonstrating that ongoing climate change is affecting many environmental processes.
32-5 ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY/POLLUTION
33-3862
Adaptation. Climate change. Mitigation. Plan quality.
Mounting evidence of global climate change encourages planning responses that seek to mitigate change and to adapt to changes considered to be inevitable. The province of British Columbia recently mandated that municipal official community plans (OCPs) contain targets and policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The authors use content analysis to evaluate mitigation and adaptation content in 39 OCPs, and find that 25 of the OCPs explicitly address climate change, and that the OCPs are stronger with respect to goals and policies than to fact base and implementation provisions. The paper concludes with recommendations for strengthening municipal climate change planning.
33-3863
Air quality. Air quality management. Emission control. Urban air quality.
In this study, an atmospheric dispersion model along with a systematic emission inventory was used to explore the possible control strategy to reduce ambient levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in Kanpur city, India. A GIS based emission inventory of NOx was developed for the base, 5th and 10th years. It was observed that the 5th and 10th years will experience increased emissions by factors of 1.7 and 2.5 of the base year if no control policy is implemented. Seventeen control options (i.e. introduction of Euro 6 to vehicles, banning of 15-year old private vehicles etc.) were considered for evaluation through the dispersion modelling. A control scenario comprising the following control options (1) implementation of Euro 6 for vehicles, (2) compressed natural gas (CNG) for commercial and public vehicles, etc. was found to be most effective in reducing the ambient NOx levels and attaining a 24-hour average air quality standard.
33-3864
Climate change. Methodology. Nature. Research methodology.
The people of Andean Ecuador face considerable risks due to climate change; however, a fundamental obstacle for those seeking to understand these risks is the lack of detailed, long-term meteorological data for the region. This research describes recent patterns of climate change at Volcán Chimborazo, Ecuador, through an integration of climatological data, qualitative data provided by local residents, and information derived from a detailed analysis of recent glacier change on the mountain. Although instrumental records indicate a local warming of 0.11°C decade-1 between 1986 and 2011 (0.26°C total), these data suggest that precipitation has remained largely unchanged. Local residents (farmers and nonfarmers, irrigators and nonirrigators), however, report that there has been a noticeable reduction in rainfall and surface water availability in recent decades, and the near ubiquity of this observation suggests that the instrumental record has not captured these patterns of climate change. Between 1986 and 2013, Chimborazo experienced a 21 percent (±9 percent) reduction in ice surface area and a 180 m increase in the mean minimum elevation of non-debris-covered ice. Because measured warming can only account for an ∼50 m increase in freezing level height, these changes indicate that shifting precipitation patterns are indeed occurring. These results show that integrating information from a variety of empirical and nonempirical sources provides valuable information about local manifestations of climate change that might otherwise remain unrecognized in highly heterogeneous mountain landscapes. This integrative capacity is a unique—and critically important—contribution that geographers can make to climate change science.
33-3865
Carbon dioxide. Coastal environment. Coastal regions. Forest regions.
Within a geographic information systems environment, we combine field measures of mangrove tree diameter, mangrove species distribution, and mangrove tree density with remotely sensed measures of mangrove location and mangrove canopy cover to estimate the mangrove carbon holdings of northern Ecuador. We find that the four northern estuaries of Ecuador contain approximately 7,742,999 t (±15.47 percent) of standing carbon. Of particularly high carbon holdings are the Rhizophora mangle–dominated mangrove stands found in and around the Cayapas-Mataje Ecological Reserve in northern Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador, and certain stands of Rhizophora mangle in and around the Isla Corazón y Fragata Wildlife Refuge in central Manabí Province, Ecuador. Our field-driven mangrove carbon estimate is higher than all but one of the comparison models evaluated. We find that basic latitudinal mangrove carbon models performed at least as well, if not better, than the more complex species-based allometric models in predicting standing carbon levels. In addition, we find that improved results occur when multiple models are combined as opposed to relying on any one single model for mangrove carbon estimates. The high level of carbon contained in these mangrove forests, combined with the future atmospheric carbon sequestration potential they offer, makes it a necessity that they are included in any future payment for ecosystem services strategy aimed at using forest systems to offset CO2 emissions and mitigate predicted CO2-driven temperature increases.
33-3866
Climate. Climate change. United States.
In this research, the Spatial Synoptic Classification (SSC), a weather type scheme, is used as an alternative method of demonstrating evidence of climate change in the Eastern United States and southern Canada. Changes in frequencies for the seven SSC weather types were assessed for summer trends (May–September) at thirty-eight stations and also at four regions of latitude between 1950 and 2015. Using the SSC, results show significant summer decreases in dry polar (DP) days and transitional (TR) days and significant increases in moist tropical (MT) days. The North region exhibited the greatest breadth of significant results among all weather types. The DP and TR decline was strongest at higher latitudes and weakened approaching the subtropics. The MT gain was strongest across the midlatitudes but statistically significant in all four regions. The four remaining SSC weather types showed more localized statistically significant trends. Results suggest that these trends in weather type frequency are an indicator of summer climate change, with some stations losing over 50 percent of their DP frequency, losing over 40 percent of their TR frequency, and gaining over 30 percent of their MT frequency since 1950.
32-6 CATASTROPHES/DISASTERS/EMERGENCIES
33-3867
Disaster. Natural disasters. Rural areas. United States. Urban areas.
The concept of disaster resilience has gained attention in political spheres and news outlets over the past few years, yet relatively few empirical measures of the concept exist. Furthermore, research into urban resilience has dwarfed our understanding of disaster resilience in rural places. This schism in what is known about the differences between urban and rural places becomes the topic of this article. Employing a suite of spatial and statistical techniques using an established measure of community resilience, the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC), we focus on two key questions to better explain the resilience divide between urban and rural areas of the United States. Nonparametric rank analysis, analysis of variance, and logistic regression help describe the relationships between rurality and disaster resilience in contrast to resilience in urban areas. Pinpointing the driving factors, or characteristics, of resilience in rural America compared to metropolitan America, accomplished through binary logistic regression, revealed notable distinctions. Resilience in urban areas is primarily driven by economic capital, whereas community capital is the most important driver of disaster resilience in rural areas. Within rural areas there is considerable spatial variability in the components of disaster resilience. This suggests that attempts to enhance resilience cannot be approached using a one-size-fits-most strategy given the variability in the primary drivers of disaster resilience at county scales.
33-3868
Colonialism. Environment. Indigenous organizations. Indigenous people. Natural hazards.
The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside a dramatic rise in natural hazard events. This article explores indigenous people’s response to this intersection of concerns around hazards and contentious development beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study located in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site of a 6.9 magnitude earthquake, controversial hydropower projects, and an indigenous antidam protest, I show how people’s relationship with a sacred, animate landscape is not easily translatable into the clear goals of environmental politics. Antidam activists and environmentalists link growing ecological precarity in Sikkim to state-led hydropower construction, but for many lay indigenous people, these earthquakes raise deeper cultural anxieties. I demonstrate how these anxieties are grounded in a longer history of the contested relationship between marginalized peoples and hegemonic state and nonstate powers, a relationship that continues in the fraught relationship of the Himalayan margins to the Indian state. I argue that critical engagements with indigenous environmentalism must be in dialogue with diverse interpretations and registers of loss and erasure. In this I follow recent calls to decolonize the Anthropocene that demand that we move beyond a politics of urgency to examine the slow, historical processes of erasure under colonialism and imperialism. I highlight these narratives to argue for a more holistic approach to the uneven impacts of climate change on mountainous environments and their inhabitants.
33-3869
Climate. Climate change. Flooding. Floodplains. Floods. Natural hazards. Urban development.
This article conducts a national, county-based assessment of the changes in population and urban areas in high-risk flood zones from 2001 to 2011 in the contiguous United States. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) 100-year flood maps, land cover data, and census data were used to extract the proportion of developed (urban) land in flood zones by county at the two time points, and indexes of difference were calculated. Local Moran’s I statistic was applied to identify hot spots of increase in urban area in flood zones, and geographically weighted regression was used to estimate the population in flood zones from the land cover data. Results show that in 2011, an estimate of about 25.3 million people (8.3 percent of the total population) lived in high-risk flood zones. Nationally, the ratio of urban development in flood zones is less than the ratio of land in flood zones, implying that Americans were responsive to flood hazards by avoiding development in flood zones. This trend varied from place to place, however, with coastal counties having less urban development in flood zones than the inland counties. Furthermore, the contrast between coastal and inland counties increased between 2001 and 2011. Finally, several exceptions from the trend (hot spots) were detected, most notably in New York City and Miami, where significant increases in urban development in flood zones were found. This assessment provides important baseline information on the spatial patterns of flood exposure and their changes from 2001 to 2011. The study pinpoints regions that might need further investigations and better policy to reduce the overall flood risks.
32-7 SUSTAINABILITY
33-3870
Conservation. Development. Heritage. Nature.
Mountains are one of the last refuges of biodiversity worldwide. As the global discourse on nature conservation becomes prominent within sustainability debates and local populations continue to be blamed for environmental destruction, projected territorial expansion of protected areas will likely lead to high levels of conflict and contestation around mountains of the world. At the same time, deeper penetration of transnational advocacy networks and wider connections of civil society will bring new tools of resistance to bear on this conflict. We propose that democracy plays an increasingly critical role in assisting local opposition to thwart new restrictions on access to natural areas prioritized for conservation. We illustrate this larger argument through the case of the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area (GHNPCA), recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Indian Himalayas. In their opposition to exclusion, local communities have employed heritage as a weapon, successfully marshaling the representation of the region as the “Valley of the Gods” and putting their cultural heritage to work against global conservation agendas. Tourism posters depicting the sacred geography of numerous local deities allow local communities to justify opposition to the conservation status that restricts access to their gods, while channeling their demands through elected representatives. The state navigates this complex territory between global and local heritage uneasily, primarily through a series of compromises at the local level. This article focuses on the ways in which mountain heritage—local and global, cultural and natural—is negotiated in the crucible of democracy.
33-3871
Climate change. Social impact analysis. Water.
This article develops a novel theoretical framework to explain how water’s situatedness relates to its political agency. Recent posthuman scholarship emphasizes these qualities but, surprisingly, no sustained analysis has been undertaken of this interrelation. Here we do so by theorizing water as a “time-substance” to reposition human hydrological struggles (including those exacerbated by climate change) around the topologies and temporalities rather than the spatialities of water. This innovative approach opens up new areas of geographical enquiry based on hydrosocial forms, hydrosocial transformations, and hydrosocial information (collectively referred to here as hydrosocialities). We contend that hydrosocialities enable the tracing of human–water relations that transcend times and scales and the matricial categories of subject and object to overcome the situated–agential binary of water. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Mustang, Nepal, this conceptual framework is deployed to examine hydrosocialities in two remote mountain communities. We show hydrosocialities that comprise diverse water knowledge practices constituted from multiple points of proximity between the social and the hydrological in space and time. In turn, this conceptual framework underscores the importance of boundary objects in mediating water’s situated–agential qualities. The article concludes that consequently boundary objects can play a crucial role in producing new practical hydrosocial politics of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
33-3872
Asia. Nature. Parks. Protected areas.
This article traces the evolution of land protection in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. The Pamirs form the “Roof of the World,” where the Hindu Kush, Karakoram, Tian Shan, and Kunlun Shan ranges converge. Field and archival research identified (1) the origin and diffusion of parks and protected areas across the globe, (2) the biophysical properties of the Pamir Mountains that inspired the conservation efforts, (3) the sequence of land protection from national park to supranational World Heritage recognition, and (4) the characteristics of the Pamir Mountains that justify UNESCO Biosphere Reserve status. Stalin forcefully depopulated these highlands in the 1930s. Tense Soviet–Sino relations in the 1960s and the prolonged Soviet–Afghan war further restricted human movements. When Gorbachev’s perestroika allowed return migration in the mid-1980s, Tajik farmers and Kirghiz pastoralists resettled a landscape of thriving plants and wildlife. Concurrently, a nascent coalition of citizen scientists and government officials began advocating for a park. In 1992 the government established the Tajik National Park to protect environmental and sacred sites, promote traditional economic activity, and develop tourism. The antecedent Soviet collapse, civil war, economic upheaval, and renewed conflict in Afghanistan, however, complicated land protection. In 2013, UNESCO designated the Tajik National Park as a World Heritage Site. Establishing a Biosphere Reserve is the next step to promoting transboundary conservation with the adjacent protected areas in China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The potential reserve size, terrain, and demographic trajectory are consistent with the Man and the Biosphere model.
33. Physical Elements of Planning
33-4 GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS
33-3873
Data. Geographic information systems. Media. Qualitative analysis. Social conditions. Visualization.
Qualitative geographic information systems (GIS) has progressed in meaningful ways since early calls for a qualitative GIS in the 1990s. From participatory methods to the invention of the participatory geoweb and finally to geospatial social media sources, the amount of information available to nonquantitative GIScientists has grown tremendously. Recently, researchers have advanced qualitative GIS by taking advantage of new data sources, like Twitter, to illustrate the occurrence of various phenomena in the data set geospatially. At the same time, computer scientists in the field of natural language processing have built increasingly sophisticated methods for digesting and analyzing large text-based data sources. In this article, the authors implement one of these methods, topic modeling, and create a visualization method to illustrate the results in a visually comparative way, directly onto the map canvas. The method is a step toward making the advances in natural language processing available to all GIScientists. The article discusses the ways in which geography plays an important part in understanding the results presented from the model and visualization, including issues of place and space.
34. Transportation and Communication
34-3 TRANSPORTATION PLANNING
33-3874
Alternative fuels. Economy. Market demand. Multilevel models. Road networks. Supply and demand.
Expanding road capacity and raising fuel economy are two policy mechanisms to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but each is susceptible to feedback effects that might offset their overall effectiveness at promoting sustainable transportation. Expanding road capacity engenders more traffic through the induced demand effect and raising fuel economy encourages more use through the rebound effect. Research on each feedback effect is evident in the sustainable transportation literature. However, research on their interaction is lacking. To fill this void, this article analyzes how additional road capacity and higher fuel economy interact to affect individual vehicle kilometers of travel (VKT) in metropolitan areas across the United States. The article pools individual data from the respective 2001 and 2009 National Household Travel Surveys (NHTS) and adopts a novel methodological approach known as multilevel modeling to estimate a three-level VKT model that nests individuals within vehicles within metropolitan areas. Data on fuel economy at the vehicle level provide an accurate estimate of the rebound effect and data on additional capacity at the metropolitan area level provide an accurate estimate of the induced demand effect. Results indicate that the feedback effects do indeed interact to affect individual travel behavior. Further research with three time points of individual data from the NHTS is necessary to establish a trend, but the empirical results suggest that the interaction between these feedback effects decreases their efficacy to mitigate GHG emissions. However, some of these effects could be offset by higher road and fuel prices.
35. Architecture and Urban Design
35-1 URBAN DESIGN
33-3875
Buildings. Capital. Cost estimates. Green areas. Sustainability. Value orientations.
The history of the application of life-cycle costing (LCC) began in the UK in the late 1950s and, until now, the state of its development as a concept is not clear. A literature review is presented that shows the changing approaches to LCC by drawing on four major academic journals and 45 peer-reviewed papers. The review verifies that there is a revival of interest in using LCC in tandem with other life-cycle methodologies for research on sustainable building. It also presents a set of methods that are applicable to model and estimate the life-cycle costs of ‘conventional’ and ‘green’ buildings with the objective of distinguishing them. Through the information gathered, it provides a centralized source of reference for the assumptions used in LCC calculations concerning some key input parameters. The finding shows an increasing trend of publications on the evaluation of economic options for green building designs and performance. The directions are clear that the concepts and methods have to evolve to a state where they will help to integrate and optimize economic, social and environmental considerations to deliver more sustainable built environments in the future.
35-2 HISTORIC PRESERVATION
33-3876
Adaptive management. Australia. Buildings. Governance. Heritage. Regulation. Sustainable development.
The resilience and capacity of historic buildings to adapt plays a vital role in mitigating climate change through adaptive reuse. The adaptive reuse of buildings is a practical substitute to demolition and has substantial economic, environmental and social benefits. However, tensions exist between the retention of heritage buildings and conformance with regulatory requirements (e.g. energy efficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, disability access, etc.). This raises questions about whether regulatory systems can embrace both green building technologies and heritage conservation principles. This paper examines the challenges/barriers to successful adaptive reuse projects in Australia using a qualitative approach that involves multiple case studies and in-depth interviews with industry experts coupled with field observation and building plan appraisals. The findings show that compliance to codes/regulations and current design requirements are the major challenges encountered in undertaking adaptive reuse projects. The underlying parameters of the identified challenges will serve as an initiative for formulating prospective regulations that address changing building use, encourage the integration of modern technologies and inhibit unnecessary building demolition for future global climate protection.
33-3877
Buildings. Cost estimates. Cost-effectiveness. Energy consumption. Energy efficiency.
The economic viability and investment cost of the energy retrofit of apartment buildings are analysed through different energy efficiency levels. To analyse retrofit policy cost-optimal energy efficiency levels and investment costs, a baseline of measured actual energy usage of apartment buildings was created and then individual energy-saving measures and retrofit packages were composed. The cost-optimal level over a 20-year period for apartment building retrofit was a low-energy-building energy performance level, with an investment cost of 150–170/m2. Retrofit to low energy building level would be economically viable but the investment capability of apartment owner associations is found to be insufficient for the necessary investments to achieve low-energy-building energy performance. Therefore, it is necessary to determine what levels of financial support can encourage retrofit to occur. The analysis of the current retrofit shows that subsides will increase investment by apartment owner associations into energy efficiency improvements. The target group for energy efficiency retrofit subsidies should be apartment buildings that reach low energy building performance level or at least match the energy performance requirement for new buildings.
35-3 VISUAL FORM
33-3878
Comfort. Public perceptions. Visual impact.
This research investigates the effects of perceived indoor temperature on glare sensation. A laboratory experiment was carried out where volunteers (n?=?19) performed an office-like computer task. Three scenarios with sunspots over the desk were evaluated: a cold scenario, a comfort scenario and a hot scenario. All had the same vertical illuminance at the eye and luminance ratios. Discomfort glare was measured with the predictive daylight glare probability (DGP) model; actual perception of glare was assessed with glare sensation vote (GSV) scale; while thermal comfort was evaluated with thermal sensation vote (TSV) scale. In order to know how much the perceived temperature contributes to the model, an ordinal regression was performed. The result showed a Nagelkerke pseudo-R2?=?0.52, p =?0.001, indicating that the perceived temperature affected glare predictions. This is an improvement in the understanding of daylight glare, which will allow researchers and practitioners to make informed decisions about sustainable design and occupant comfort. In conclusion, a more comprehensive glare model should include perceived temperature as a variable of the current glare model. Also, the results suggest that DGP should be used only when the person is in thermal comfort.
33-3879
Environmental conditions. Housing maintenance. Maintenance. Services.
The service life of cement-rendered facades is closely related to the environmental conditions to which they are exposed. The probability distribution is determined for the degradation condition of render facades considering different environmental exposures. A sample of 100 render facades was subjected to meticulous fieldwork to determine their condition. The analysis focuses on the environmental factors that most influence the overall degradation of the facades, evaluated through the condition level. Probabilistic models based on Markov chains are developed to predict the evolution of facade deterioration according to exposure to outdoor environmental conditions. The proposed model provides data on the synergy between the degradation agents and the degradation condition of render facades, the average time of permanence in each degradation level, and indications of the effect of degradation on the durability of render that may be applied in the implementation and fine-tuning of maintenance procedures. A better understanding of the durability of render facades allows a more rational management of their maintenance, contributing to a reduction of their life cycle costs. The proposed stochastic model provides information that can be applied in the context of insurance policies, allowing an evaluation of the risk of failure of coatings.
35-5 DESIGN METHODS
33-3880
Buildings. Emissions. Energy planning. Environmental assessment. Greenhouses. Location. Residential development. Transportation.
While most life-cycle assessments of buildings have focused on construction and use phases, the location of a building can significantly affect the transportation demand of its inhabitants. The life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of two representative buildings in Lisbon, Portugal, are compared: an apartment building in the city centre and a semidetached house in a suburban area. An integrated approach is used to conduct a life-cycle analysis that includes building construction, building use and user transportation. Sensitivity analyses are used to evaluate impacts for multiple locations. For the apartment, building use accounted for the largest share of energy and emissions (63–64%), while for the house, most (51–57%) of the energy and emissions were associated with user transportation. Energy and GHG emissions for suburban locations were significantly higher (by 55–115%) than those in the city-centre locations, largely due to individuals commuting by car. The analysis demonstrates the significance of transportation and highlights the importance of residence location in urban planning and environmental assessments. These results are likely to apply to other southern European cities that have expanded with significant growth in car ownership and use. To improve urban sustainability, development strategies should consider the transport infrastructure in addition to building efficiency.
33-3881
Assessment. Buildings. Design process. Strategic planning.
Construction professionals are required to integrate environmental concerns in the earliest design phases. However, environmental assessments need large amounts of precise data that are typically not available in the early design process, as most variables are still fluid. To address this concern, a new approach explores how environmental information on building components can be simplified for strategic use early in the design process in a Danish context. In this paper, life cycle assessments (LCAs) are undertaken for several hundred typical external wall solutions, based on relevant standards. A full bivariate linear regression analysis is performed, showing statistically significant correlations with strong direct relationships between environmental impact categories. A simplified LCA profile consisting of total primary energy, global warming potential and acidification potential is developed. This simplified LCA profile presents environmental data in a more understandable way, creating a strategic overview that can be easily used by non-technical clients and construction professionals in the early design stages. This has a scientific and statistical validity generated by environmental assessment standards, and creates a parallel between the precision of the approach and its time of use in the design process.
33-3882
Buildings. Governance. Performance. Regulation. Sustainability.
Building regulatory agencies worldwide are grappling with how to define and implement appropriate mandatory and voluntary measures for new and existing buildings that address societal and political demands for increased environmental and resource sustainability and resiliency to the effects of climate change without lessening the historical building regulatory focus on health, safety and welfare of building occupants. It can be argued that a transition from prescriptive to performance-based building regulatory regimes, coupled with the introduction of new policy objectives for sustainability and resiliency, in a rather short period of time, without full assessment of how they interact with existing building regulatory objectives, and without broadly agreed holistic solutions, has led to the introduction of new objectives that have the potential to result in increased hazards and risks to occupants. To explore the current situation and future needs associated with performance building regulatory regimes and the inclusion of sustainability and resiliency objectives for new and existing buildings, the literature was reviewed and a survey of building regulatory bodies and institutions in 12 countries was conducted to obtain perspectives on whether and how sustainability and resiliency objectives are being incorporated into their building regulations and if any challenges have been identified.
33-3883
Agency decision making. Community participation. Design. Participatory research. Social networks.
The co-production of resilience in European urban neighbourhoods is explored based on the experiences from a case study. Within the current ‘resilience imperative’, co-production processes involving multiple stakeholders can be a key factor for increasing cities’ resilience. Co-produced resilience processes are more successful when embedded in collaborative forms of governance such as those associated with urban commons and when fulfilling needed roles with a community. Through the application of the R-Urban approach in a neighbourhood of Colombes (near Paris), the co-production of a commons-based resilience strategy is described. This involved a group of designers as initiators and a number of citizen as stakeholders of a network of civic hubs. The specific strategies involving a participatory setting, collective governance aspects and circular economies are analysed in the light of co-production theories and practices. Internal and external challenges are identified within the implementation process. The nature of conflicts and negotiations in this co-production approach are discussed, and the role of the architects/designers as agents within the process is investigated. Reflections from this example are provided on the limits and promises of this approach and the lessons learned from R-Urban for collaborative civic resilience.
35-6 PROGRAMMING/FACILITY PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
33-3884
Built environment. Disaster. Health care. Learning.
Extreme weather events (EWEs) represent an important opportunity for hospital facilities managers to learn lessons to improve future hospital resilience. However, little is known about the process by which this occurs and how effectively this happens. These questions are addressed by an exploration of how individual hospital stakeholders learn about the performance of their facilities and share these lessons in the adaptation of future hospital disaster management plans. More specifically, the evidence of behavioural and social/collective learning is investigated amongst hospital stakeholders during EWEs. The data gathered from a case study of a major hospital network of four hospitals were qualitatively analysed within a constructionist ontology and interpretivist epistemology using causal loop diagrams (CLDs). This revealed how lessons were learned in the hospital network from collective stakeholder EWEs’ experiences. The findings highlight the need to develop appropriate processes and structures to capture, share and use facilities-related knowledge and embed new lessons learnt into future hospital disaster planning processes. Using Nonaka and Takeuchi’s model of organizational knowledge creation, this paper presents new theoretical and practical insights for hospital facilities managers to build hospital resilience by better capturing the facilities-related lessons learnt in responding to an EWE.
33-3885
Built environment. Climate change. Community. Energy negotiations. Ethics. Local economy. Negotiation.
The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. A first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating, caring for and repairing the longstanding ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. The capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by a utilitarian positioning of natural environments by economic science. Ecologists have gone further in capturing the interdependence of economies and ecologies with the concept of socio-ecological resilience. Of concern, however, is the persistence of a vision of an economy ordered by market determinations in which there is no role for ethical negotiation between humans and with the non-human world. This paper reframes economy–ecology relations, resituating humans within ecological communities and resituating non-humans in ethical terms. It advances the idea of community economies (as opposed to capitalist economies) and argues that these must be built if we are to sustain life in the Anthropocene. The argument is illustrated with reference to two construction projects situated in ‘Monsoon Asia’.
33-3886
Adaptive management. Business. Governance. Planning strategies. Property development. Real estate. Sustainability.
This paper is premised on a conceptual framework that attempts to draw theoretical and practical connections between sustainability, resilience and adaptation. The framework is explored through a case study of the corporate real estate (property) strategies of Goldman Sachs (a multinational investment banking and investment management company) developed over the course of the consolidation and development of its corporate headquarters. This case seeks to identify the existence and nature of the relationships by and between sustainable corporate real estate strategies, resilient operations planning and the firm’s adaptive capacity. A secondary proposition seeks to evaluate whether the capacity of the firm to adapt and be resilient to changing conditions has been positively advanced by the firm’s sustainable corporate real estate strategies. The findings support the proposition that these connections do exist, as well as the proposition that sustainability was promoting adaptive capacity and operational resilience. However, it remains an open question to what extent these practices and capacities are deterministic of one another. This paper sets the stage for future research that seeks to measure and model organizational adaptive capacity and to understand the potential co-benefits that may serve the interests of firms who struggle to rationalize the costs of sustainability.
33-3887
Adaptation. Building performance. Buildings. Climate change. Regulation.
Many new and emerging regulations and standards for buildings focus on climate change mitigation through energy and carbon reduction. In cool climates, such reductions are achieved by optimizing the building for heat retention. It is increasingly recognized, however, that some degree of climate change is now inevitable. New and existing buildings need to consider this to ensure resilience and an ability to adapt over time. In this context, the current approach to regulation that largely remains focused on the ‘point of handover’ may not be fit for purpose. This paper focuses on a ‘typical’ dwelling designed to a range of standards, representing current or emerging approaches to minimizing energy use, using a range of construction methods, where a number of adaptations are available to occupants. It considers, through the use of building performance simulation, how each configuration is likely to perform thermally over time given current climate change predictions. It is demonstrated that the current approach to assessing overheating risk in dwellings, coupled with the regulatory focus on reducing energy consumption, could result in significant levels of overheating. This overheating could, in the near future, present a risk to health and result in the need for significant interventions.
35-7 ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL SYSTEMS
33-3888
Energy efficiency. Job training. Performance. Residential development. Technology. Vocational training.
Meeting European emissions targets is reliant on innovative renewable technologies, particularly ‘renewable heat’ from heat pumps. Heat pump performance is driven by Carnot efficiency and optimum performance requires the lowest possible space heating flow temperatures leading to greater sensitivity to poor design, installation and operation. Does sufficient training and installer capacity exist for this technology? This paper situates the results of heat pump field trial performance in a socio-technical context, identifying how far installer competence requirements are met within the current vocational education and training (VET) system and considers possible futures. Few UK installers have formal heat pump qualifications at National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 3 and heat pump VET is generally through short-course provision where the structure of training is largely unregulated with no strict adherence to a common syllabus or a detailed training centre specification. Prerequisites for short-course trainees, specifically the demand for heating system knowledge based on metric design criteria, is limited and proof of ‘experience’ is an accepted alternative to formal educational qualifications. The lack of broader educational content and deficiencies in engineering knowledge will have profound negative impacts on both the performance and market acceptance of heat pumps. Possible futures to address this problem are identified.
33-3889
Building design. Building elements. Energy efficiency. Environmental conditions.
In the automation of interior window shading devices, a control system that relies on a prediction of environmental conditions and a building’s thermal response can provide savings to space-conditioning loads beyond what can be achieved using a reactive approach. The development of these control strategies can be difficult because of the uniqueness of each building. A simplified model-based predictive control (MPC) method for window shades is proposed. To this end, a control-oriented model representing the heat transfer problem in a perimeter office space was developed. The parameters of the model were estimated using the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). The energy-savings potential of the EnKF-based MPC approach for window shades was investigated using EnergyPlus simulations. This was accomplished by implementing the control-oriented model into the energy management system application of EnergyPlus. Simulations were conducted to assess the energy saving potential of using the EnKF-based MPC for roller blinds in a south-facing perimeter office space in Ottawa, Canada. The simulation-based results indicate the potential for about 35% reduction in electricity usage for space conditioning over manually operated interior roller blinds.
33-3890
Environment. Flooding. Floods. Measurement.
An experimental investigation is used to quantify the flow rates through individual outlets of multi-outlet siphonic roof drainage systems under both full-pipe and partially filled pipe flow conditions. A pressure transducer and a propeller-type current meter were installed within each tailpipe to measure water depth and flow velocity. The study tests the hypothesis that it may be possible to predict accurately the flow rates through individual outlets of multi-outlet siphonic roof drainage systems. A new technique of estimating flow rates is trialled by comparing instantaneous pressure transducer and current meter readings with previously calibrated flow data to find the best data match. The study results were very positive and clearly demonstrate that the underlying methodology was appropriate and that it may be possible to model numerically the individual outlet flow rates in multi-outlet siphonic roof drainage systems.
33-3891
Adaptation. Comfort. Environment.
The comfort zone is bounded by thermal environmental conditions that may be described as acceptably cool or acceptably warm, and engineering out of existence these innocuous thermal conditions on the fringes of the adaptive comfort range may not be necessary. In contrast to the conventional understanding of local discomfort, spatial alliesthesia exploits corrective differences in the rate of change in skin temperature between individual body segments to elicit positive affective sensations. This paper examines reverse instances of local discomfort, or spatial alliesthesia, from warm contact stimuli applied to hand and feet when exposed to ambient conditions towards the lower margin of the comfort zone. It was found that subjects with moderate feelings of displeasure or even indifference were still capable of experiencing a pleasant response to localized thermal stimuli. Brief whole-body thermal pleasure was observed from in-situ skin temperature changes at a single distal body site. These effects were subtle and not universally experienced, so the success of their deliberate implementation in built environments depends heavily on some form of individual control. Spatial alliesthesia therefore complements the body of literature investigating personal environmental control and local thermal discomfort by providing a theoretical framework of thermal perception in non-neutral environments.
35-8 UNIVERSAL DESIGN
33-3892
Design. Design process. Sustainability. Sustainable development.
An ecomimetic method is developed as an innovative and transdisciplinary design approach rooted in the field of biomimetics. This new method emulates the interrelated complexity of the parts of an ecosystem with the intent to design buildings that are more efficient, effective and holistic. Ecomimetics refers to the design of buildings that mimic ecosystem processes and functions. This approach provides potential opportunities for climate change adaptation and mitigation by optimizing the use of resources in buildings. One challenge to the application of ecomimetics in architecture is the lack of systematic methods supported by scientific research, which may prevent development in this field. A theoretical basis and the initial development of an ecomimetic design method is presented, with a description of each step of the design process. Ecological systems are selected for functional properties that match architectural design goals, and then design tools are used to abstract and transfer those properties to architectural systems. The design tools integrated in the method are from the fields of ecological engineering, systems dynamics and architecture. The case of the Eastgate Center in Harare, Zimbabwe, is used to illustrate the method.
33-3893
Apartment housing. Building performance. Buildings. Europe. Housing. Typology.
Several authors have successfully created and employed vintage cohorts and housing typologies in research addressing energy renovation needs in the existing dwelling stock. This paper suggests that the idea of types would be useful in creating living quality-related renovation and adaptation concepts for homes. These concepts could be used for increasing the accessibility and individuality of flats and easing life in cramped conditions by means of design. Therefore, the study tests the approach by examining the plan design of flats in one cohort: the Finnish 1960–80s’ dwelling stock. A total of 320 apartment blocks with 8745 flats in 51 cities are examined. The study identifies 18 different types of flats, which are based on 10 basic layouts, representing over 80% of all flats. Although the housing production of this era was characterized by cost-efficiency and industrialized prefabrication technologies, the result can be deemed somewhat surprising. This is because the building layouts were never standardized in Finland: only the production technology was standardized. The identified flat types are estimated to cover as much as one-third of all existing Finnish flats. These findings provide future opportunities for creating new mass-tailored renovation concepts.
33-3894
Adaptive behavior. Analysis. Buildings. Investment. Life domains. Real estate. Value orientations.
The physical adaptability of buildings is very important in today’s fast-changing business environment. The actors who invest in long-term adaptability are positioned better to the changes during the life cycle of a building. This conceptual paper argues that the current dominating real estate (property) investment analysis theories do not accommodate enough building design-related information (i.e. physical asset characteristics), which results in long-term loss of competitiveness and unsustainable use of built environment resources. It is demonstrated that physical asset characteristics can create valuable real options that should be acknowledged in real estate investment analysis and management. The real estate investment literature has not so far been able to produce a widely accepted financial model for justifying life-cycle investments. A theory is proposed here that can be used to value life-cycle investments in buildings. This new theory combines of real options valuation, investment analysis and building component life-cycle design. These themes are used to formulate a conceptual framework for valuing life-cycle investments. The framework is intuitive and transparent, and it can be easily added to current spreadsheet investment analysis tools.
36. Environmenal Psychology/Environment, Behavior, and Society
36-1 ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION/COGNITION
33-3895
Neoliberalism. Politics. Security.
This review article reads across David Chandler’s Resilience, Brad Evans and Julian Reid’s Resilient Life and Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment to explore the possibilities for critical thought on security beyond resilience. Read together, these works suggest that resilience approaches offer a topological form of security that interiorizes the outside’s de-territorializing potential – a movement that might be countered by a radical atmospherics of security that enables socio-ecological difference to persist as difference. At stake is the relation between critique and potentiality: while topological security turns critique into a stabilizing force, atmospheric security refuses the demands for socio-ecological difference to make itself legible as either proper adaptation or improper maladaptation. An atmospherics of security orients politics and ethics around both the durative and anticipatory temporal registers of potentiality.
33-3896
Geographic patterning. Geopolitics. Nature. Politics.
This conversation considers the contemporary popularity across the academy and among the wider public of the idea that humans and nature are always interconnected, as reflected especially in the idea of the Anthropocene. On the one hand, the popularity of nondualist ideas and related practices suggests the widespread acceptance of concepts long at the core of geographical thought and, as such, these new phenomena seem to be something to be celebrated by geographers. On the other hand, these nondualist ideas and practices are also unleashing new forms of politics, particularly regarding efforts to engineer a range of new natures, including bodies, ecosystems, and the earth system writ large. Therefore, we propose that geography’s longstanding and intradisciplinary attention to interconnections among humans and nature is as essential now as ever. We no longer have to convince others that humans and nature are interconnected, but rather than celebrate this, our task now is to investigate how nondualism works and with what effects.
33-3897
Adaptation. Assessment. Climate change. Complexity in planning. Decision making. Uncertainty.
Geographers can meaningfully and uniquely contribute to problem solving and assist vulnerable populations in making informed decisions. Contemporary environmental and social problems are complex and accompanied by uncertainty. Decisions must be made in the face of this uncertainty. In this address, geographers are encouraged to embrace, rather than minimize, complexity and uncertainty in their research and in their interactions with decision makers. Adaptation to climate change is used to illustrate the ubiquitous uncertainty surrounding problem solving and how the choice of assessment framework can overemphasize some sources of uncertainty and ignore others. A challenge is to communicate the information about complexity and uncertainty that decision makers need for robust and flexible decision making but at the same time prevent uncertainty from being equated with a lack of consensus and used as a reason for inaction. Geographers need to be open to a plurality of approaches to decision making and acknowledge uncertainty in their own research. Reframing the communication of uncertainty and the development of novel educational tools and learning materials for decision makers will facilitate decision making. Sustained engagement with decision makers, including the coproduction of knowledge, can also lead to greater consideration of complexity and uncertainty and to improved decision making. Rather than “keeping it simple,” geographers should “keep it complex.”
36-2 ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS/MEANING
33-3898
Arts. Geographical analysis. Politics. Poverty. Poverty reduction. Visual impact. Visualization.
In the context of geography’s heterogeneous engagements with the visual, we present an experiment in doing radical intradisciplinarity in which we make a case for the possibilities of visual politics. Conducting cross-readings of maps and artwork, we explore how radical intradisciplinarity might enable us to explore a visual politics committed to seeing what is and also what might be.
33-3899
Archaeology. Nature. Religion.
Located in the upper valley of Tsagaan Gol, in northwestern Mongolia’s Altai Mountains, the sacred mountain Shiveet Khairkhan is surrounded by archaeological monuments extending in time from the Bronze Age (early third millennium BCE) through the Turkic Period (sixth to ninth centuries CE). The character of the high valley it centers and the extended physical context including rivers and glaciated mountains call to mind a sacred diagram involving a mountainous landscape, directionality, and color symbolism. Such general associations with Buddhist concepts would not be the reason Shiveet Khairkhan is considered sacred, however. The wealth of archaeology around the mountain’s base and lining the Tsagaan Gol river valley indicates that this status might go back for several thousand years, to a period much earlier than Buddhism. The material presented here derives from two decades of original archaeological survey and documentation and draws on the approaches of several different disciplines. By considering this topic in terms of integrated approaches, it is possible to suggest the complexity of Shiveet Khairkhan within its larger cultural and geographical context and to explore the ways in which this mountain might have become designated as sacred.
36-3 ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDE/AWARENESS/VALUES
33-3900
Citizen perceptions. Climate. Climate change. Flooding. Floods. Political economy.
Structural causes of vulnerability to hazards are well established in geographical research. But what facilitates individual adaptive behavior? How does the performance of government intervention affect such behavior? Drawing on political economy, environmental psychology, and climate justice perspectives, we explore how perceived fairness of responses to weather-related extreme events affects the public and private distribution of responsibility and action. We focus on flood risk and examine how perceptions of fairness of response by residents in flood-affected areas, along with their prior experience of flooding and perceptions of scope of government responsibility and capacity, affect willingness to take individual adaptive action. We use data from surveys of 356 households affected by a flood event in November 2009 in Cumbria, UK, and Galway, Ireland, to compare perceptions of fairness of responses and private intentions across two political jurisdictions. We find that aspects of fairness are related to willingness to take adaptive action but vary with context, experience, and knowledge of flooding. In Cumbria, where there is greater experience of flooding, willingness to act correlates with procedural justice, risk knowledge, and capacity. Capacity for flood management in Galway is firmly associated with state agencies, whereas in Cumbria it is perceived to result from responsibilities of public and private action. These findings highlight the central role of government action and its perceived fairness in structuring private responses to environmental risks and point to the crucial role of climate justice perspectives in navigating adaptation.
33-3901
Corporate geography. Environmental justice. Responsibility. Social conditions. Social justice.
This exchange of letters considers the relationship between geography and different formulations of justice. On one hand, social movements have made visible the particular geographies of racialized, gendered, and class-based injustice. For this reason, the discipline of geography can be useful for social justice activists making justice claims. On the other hand, the public and private institutions to which justice claims are addressed often treat justice as a stable “thing” that can be achieved through protocols and procedures. Moreover, these institutionalized approaches to justice often limit justice claims, at times even enabling the unjust actions that initiated struggles for justice in the first place. Inasmuch as geographic knowledge is incorporated into this disciplining of justice, it, too, potentially limits social struggles. By considering this tension, we highlight the tremendous need for justice and the poverty of our institutionalized responses to that need.
33-3902
Asia. Governance. Market analysis. Morality.
In Southeast Asia, actors in civil society have negotiated new social and economic realities at the conjuncture of intensifying governance and commodity production in frontier areas. As these spaces intersect, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their allies have reflected on the legitimacy of their interventions in terms of how local farmers view contrasting benefits relative to the changing expectations and promises emerging at the nexus of governance and commodity production. This article explores how a long-standing NGO network on Palawan Island, the Philippines, has drawn on its moral capital and legitimacy in forging a grassroots consortium that has implemented the carbon governance mechanism, REDD+, in a changing rural economy of expectations—one that is contested and differentiated based on its offerings and aspirations. I argue that as the NGO consortium CODE REDD tried to reframe REDD+ as a means of supporting indigenous livelihoods and climate change mitigation, it has placed its integrity and leverage at risk, as other indigenous farmers have rejected the claims and promises of the NGO REDD+ platform. I focus on a case where the NGO consortium’s efforts to reframe REDD+ in terms of indigenous, propoor discourse progresses well in some quarters, aligning with anti–oil palm social movements, but fails to meet the growing aspirations of former indigenous allies who question the consortium in favor of investing in oil palm on ancestral lands. I conclude by suggesting that as NGOs adjust their political objectives by adopting market-based governance, they could lose leverage in negotiating the impact of lucrative commodity booms.
33-3903
Activism. Ecology. Energy policy. Media. Natural gas. Social networks.
Since the mid-2000s, millions of spatiotemporally disparate and demographically heterogeneous North Americans have signed online petitions challenging proposed transcontinental Alberta oil sands export pipelines. This phenomenon typifies bottom-up, self-organized, and ostensibly extemporaneous cyberactivism. These dynamics contradict traditional theoretical assumptions about rational choice and social pressures in collective action, birthing queries regarding why individuals participate. Human geographies comprising three online petitions challenging separate proposed pipelines are accordingly examined by comparing signatories’ stated sociopolitical motivations for signing with their corresponding geospatial distributions. This innovative fusion of qualitative and quantitative research methods was designed to explore hetero versus homogeneity in signatories’ sociopolitical commitments and locations. The results empirically corroborate Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) thesis that cyberactivism is governed by a unique logic of connective action wherein participation thresholds are low, collective identities and social incentives are weak, relationships are defined socially rather than spatially, and contentious politics are highly personalized. Four integrated findings with implications for policymaking and future research are offered for consideration.
33-3904
Climate. Climate change. Political ideology. Surveys.
After a decade of steady growth in the acceptance of the existence of climate change and its anthropogenic causes, opinions have polarized, with almost one third of Americans, mostly Republicans, denying that the climate is changing or that human activity is responsible. What causes Americans to change their minds on this issue? Using a large panel data set, we examined the impacts of direct experience with weather anomalies, ideology, relative prioritization of environmental conservation in comparison to economic development, and motivated reasoning that adjusts individual opinion to align with others who share one’s party identification. A generalized ordered logit model confirmed the importance of political ideology, party identification, and relative concern about environmental conservation and economic development on attitude change. The effect of party identification strengthened with attentiveness to news and public affairs, consistent with the logic of motivated reasoning. Recent experience with hot summers, warm winters, droughts, and natural disasters had only a minimal impact on attitude change.
33-3905
Attitude. Ecological planning. Environment. Environmental attitudes. Environmental policy. Environmental value. Values. Water.
This paper examines important associations between environmental values, knowledge, concern and attitudes about water conservation policies in a desert metropolis. Specifically, we consider: (a) the combined influence of environmental value orientation, knowledge of drought conditions and concern about water use on support for water conservation policies; (b) the relative association of each individual variable on policy support; (c) factors explaining support to increase water prices and restrict water use; and (d) associations between socio-demographic factors and water policy support. Based on data from the 2009 Las Vegas Metropolitan Area Social Survey, we find that environmental value orientation, knowledge and concern are all significant predictors of water conservation, but concern stands out as the primary predictor for water policy support. Knowledge of drought conditions is the strongest predictor of support for water price increases, while concern predicts support for water use restrictions. We discuss theoretical implications and offer suggestions for water management, conservation and outreach.
33-3906
Asia. Colonialism. Responsibility. Tourism.
This article explores the grammars of responsibility through a discourse analysis of selected travel guidebooks and argues that critical theory and popular media have so far failed to bridge the gap between ideologies and practices of responsibilities. As it stands, an unspoken assumption that a particular set of practices (e.g., buying goods labeled as fair trade or boycotting sweatshop-produced clothing) is perpetuated as undeniably responsible. As long as important questions on what constitutes being ethical and by whose standards this is evaluated against is neglected, however, there is a danger of pursuing practices deemed irrefutably responsible, although they are not responsible or ethical at all. Building on the postcolonial critiques on literature in geographies of responsibilities, this article interrogates the discourses of responsibility circulated in popular media and, using examples from tourism, highlights the problematic nature of perpetuating a series of universalized instructions regarding one’s responsibilities, while revealing the many inconsistencies advocated once one takes a closer and more critical look at what is suggested. What is needed is an effort to close the gap between practices and ideologies of responsibility, where a conscious postcolonial understanding of the variance of ideals of responsibilities across time and space is reflected in our practices and how we understand practices of responsibilities.
33-3907
Feminism. Identity. Politics.
Love has been theorized as a way to rebuild fractured communities, and a potential way to overcome differences on the political Left. However, might it be dangerous to invest so much potential in the power of love? In this paper, I reflect upon Michael Hardt’s work on the necessity of love for politics. Hardt emphasizes the radical and transformative potential of love, seeing it as a collective and generative force. Yet, I argue that Hardt’s reading of love, tied to a Spinozist theorization of joy, provides a limited understanding of the affective dimensions of love. Instead, I propose that we need to think about the ambivalence and incoherence of love: how love can be both joyful and painful, enduring and transient, expansive and territorial, revolutionary and conservative. That is, to consider how love, even in its seemingly most benevolent and unconditional form, can still be a source of exclusion, violence, and domination. Ultimately, I seek to challenge this fantasy of coherence and togetherness, asking if there is still space for aspects of politics that are not joyful, that do not feel like love, that anger us, disappoint us, and that make us desire distance rather than togetherness.
36-4 SOCIO-SPATIAL FACTORS
33-3908
Feminism. Knowledge. Social theory.
In this paper, I argue that encounters with hydrogeologic processes encourage feminists to rethink the permeable surfaces between human bodies, ecological systems, and political events. Contemporary geographical accounts of environmental knowledge controversies are insufficiently attentive to how geologic processes exceed and undermine instrumental deliberative political solutions to environmental problems. Through a mobilization of feminist geophilosophy, I argue instead that the limits of instrumental knowledge are not merely produced by uncertainty or lack of evidence, but by the inhuman forces that condition feminist thinking itself. An investigation of a controversy surrounding the permeability of underground materials near a proposed in situ recovery uranium mine in South Dakota demonstrates that subterranean spaces have the ability to heighten a sense of the openness of our bodies to geological forces. Public and expert testimony of the hydrogeology of the region creatively extended scientific accounts to draw conclusions about the meaning and force of geology for the politics of uranium extraction. This essay contributes a unique account of environmental controversies in which materiality does not become instrumental or experiential knowledge but instead produces a creative understanding of permeable geologic materials which provokes feminist thought.
33-3909
Public space. Social theory. United Kingdom. Urban sociology.
This paper studies atmospheres of stillness in a contested urban public space known as the ‘Bearpit’. The purpose is to provide a nuanced account of stillness and its relationship to atmosphere. Drawing on an ethnographic examination of the Bearpit, the paper finds that the positive and beneficial aspects of stillness can be found in unexpected and unconventional places. However, there is no single, unifying experience of stillness, but rather a plurality of ‘stillings’. The paper highlights three forms of stillness distilled from study of the site – calmness, control and withdrawnness – and demonstrates how these modalities emerge from and contribute to the construction of atmospheres in the Bearpit. Moreover, these atmospheres have direct political consequences for those who take part in city life. The paper’s contribution is found in the advancement of non-anthropocentric understandings of atmosphere and the development of stillness as a way of understanding city life.
33-3910
Emotions. Geography. Restoration. Work.
Amid growing attention by geographers to materiality, emotion, and work, we draw together practices of making and communities of enthusiasm to autoethnographically trace the restoration of three Indian motorcycles, revealing restoration as a dynamic aesthetic and political practice that links restorers to communities of enthusiasm as well as to the agentic materiality of the things they restore. Restoration, we show, is a culturally and geographically situated skilled practice that links material agency to labors of love and devotion. Such devotion to things, in turn, suggests a provocative counternarrative to the unsustainable throwaway society of the Anthropocene. Emotional labor, material devotion, and handcraft skill could, we suggest, proffer positive pathways as we endeavor to make, restore, and, indeed, sustain our material world.
33-3911
Ecology. Infrastructure. Pollution. Urban areas. Urban development.
The increasingly pervasive phenomenon of light pollution spans several different fields of concern, including the loss of the night sky, energy wastage, and the effects of artificial light on circadian rhythms and nocturnal ecology. Although the scale of the problem has grown significantly in recent decades, the underlying dynamics remain only partially understood beyond the identification of specific technological pathways such as the rise of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or the capitalist transformation of the nocturnal realm. It is suggested that current approaches to the study of light, including the identification of “urban atmospheres,” the elaboration of existing approaches to urban ecology, or the extension of “smart city” type discourses, do not capture the full complexity of the politics of light under late modernity.
33-3912
Bureaucracy. Corruption. Informal sector. Infrastructure. Rights.
This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents’ everyday efforts to secure water, electricity, and building permission, the article proposes two topological figures that move beyond narrower spatial metaphors that read that state either as a fixed, hierarchically scaled entity or as a flat, wholly malleable assemblage without consequential spatial order or historicity. These are the topological state and the state outside itself. The analysis of the topological state centers on how real-time connections are forged between residents and key nodes in the bureaucracy, producing momentary reconfigurations of state form that allow low-level state actors to capture authority even as bureaucratic hierarchy is maintained. The analysis of the state outside itself focuses on how the routine actions of water engineers and municipal officers challenge the common conceptual mapping of the state as a surface with an inside and outside. Taken together, these figures reveal a temporally adept mode of political agency open to conjunctural possibilities and proximate connections but often dismissed as a near-sighted political disposition symptomatic of the poor and marginal classes’ submission to clientalist politics.
33-3913
Political theory. Socialism. Subjectivity.
This article considers the role of intergenerational recognition in processes of subject formation and political development. It leans on a broad conception of politics, following a phenomenologically oriented approach and drawing from theories of contextual recognition. Intergenerational recognition is introduced as a key dynamism and practice in intersubjective socialisation, unfolding in everyday environments among ‘significant others’. In these encounters, people take shape and are shaped as political subjects. Empirically, the article is based on research with 129 eleven- to fifteen-year-old girls and boys, including an analysis of their place-based biographies. By introducing different forms of intergenerational (mis)recognition, it shows how the formation of political subjects takes place in the most mundane environments where children and young people lead their lives. In conclusion, the article suggests that ‘political becoming’ deserves increasing attention in critical research and intergenerational recognition ought to be better identified as a social practice. Whether intentional or intuitive, the ways in which adults regard children and young people has both harmful and beneficial effects on the formation of their political subjectivities.
33-3914
Agency decision making. Colonialism. Feminism. Human rights.
Both new and historical materialisms have attracted a reputation for leading to ‘bad politics’. Historical materialisms have been accused of reducing too much to material relations and their production, whereas new materialisms have been accused of avoiding politics completely. This article reads the critique directed at materialisms against Hannah Arendt’s exceptional distrust of matter. Focusing on her concept of ‘worldliness’, it grapples with the question ‘why do we need an attention to matter in the first place?’ The attempted re-reading takes place through a feminist and postcolonial lens that draws out the contributions and failures of Arendt’s (anti)materialist framework in its banishing of matter from politics. Arendt’s focus on the prevention of dehumanisation further serves as a means to discuss materialism’s risk in negotiating the tension between deindividuation and dehumanisation.
33-3915
Environmental justice. Governance. Inequality. Regulatory policy. Spatial analysis.
We examine the role of the regulatory state in the inequitable distribution of social advantages and disadvantages. To illustrate this, we examine the spatial distribution of exposures to air toxics from noxious land uses (commonly referred to as the environmental justice problem) and inquire into the nature of state action that would allow such inequity. Findings from our inquiry lead us to focus more closely on the administrative functions of the state, especially its role as a regulatory body. A case study focusing on health risks from incompatible land uses illustrates how spatial inequities result from the formally neutral rule-making actions of regulatory agencies and their particular organizational cultures. We describe the ethical basis of the regulatory state in terms of its formal, juridical, deontological underpinnings. In contrast to this stands the alternative ethical concept of care, which is inherently relational, contextual, and preferentially attentive to the needs of the vulnerable. We argue that the regulatory state can be reformed, building structures of care to better address issues of spatial inequity. We end with a discussion of how the institutional model of the caring state might be achieved in practice.
33-3916
Behavior. Catastrophes. China. Earthquakes. Households. Social impact analysis.
This article explores the relationships between catastrophe experience and risk perception, social interaction, and household response to future catastrophes. Our main argument recognizes the geographical context in which social capital is formed and reproduced. Social relationships and norms adjust to the social landscape, which can be transformed by the spatial consequences of natural catastrophes. We therefore argue that sources of household resilience could be derived from the spatial transformation of social practices and not necessarily from catastrophe experience and risk perception directly. A case study was conducted in two postearthquake rural communities in China. The inquiry is primarily based on a household survey of 371 local residents and is further supported by an analysis of additional in-depth interviews and a review of key changes in the neighborhoods under study. The findings challenge the assumption that catastrophe experience and risk perception are related to residents’ intentions to prepare for future catastrophes. Nonetheless, the relationship might be mediated by social relationships and social norms. Catastrophe experience and risk perception can be construed as a geographical contextual factor. Further analysis provides one example of such a factor: The spatial features of postearthquake resettlements have increased the proximity between residents. This shift facilitates neighborly interaction and risk communication across a neighborhood. We discuss the nonlinear, dynamic relationships between the variables examined and the grounding of social capital in space.
33-3917
Arts. Cultural policy. Feminism. Geography. Neoliberalism. Sexuality. Urbanism.
This article takes up the challenge of extending and enhancing the literature on arts interventions and creative city policies by considering the role of feminist and queer artistic praxis in contemporary urban politics. Here I reflect on the complicities and potentialities of two Toronto-based arts interventions: Dig In and the Dirty Plotz cabaret. I analyse an example of community based arts strategy that strived to ‘revitalise’ one disinvested Toronto neighbourhood. I also reflect on my experience performing drag king urban planner, Toby Sharp. Reflecting on these examples, I show how market-oriented arts policies entangle women artists in the cultivation of spaces of depoliticised feminism, homonormativity and white privilege. However, I also demonstrate how women artists are playfully and performatively pushing back at hegemonic regimes with the radical aesthetic praxis of cabaret. I maintain that bringing critical feminist arts spaces and cabaret practice into discussions about neoliberal urban policies uncovers sites of feminist resistance and solidarity, interventions that challenge violent processes of colonisation and privatisation on multiple fronts.
33-3918
Community. Gardens. Responsibility. Social exclusion.
Geographers have a sustained interest in urban community gardens because such spaces provide a meaningful lens to interrogate the complexities of living at the intersection of nature–society relationships. Most community gardens strive to perform the dual functions of reconnecting urban residents with nature and strengthening the community. More recently, in the context of neoliberal urban restructuring, community gardens have also been viewed as platforms for the mobilization of inclusive sociopolitical arrangements to counteract the ill effects of urban problems. Common to this literature is the implicit assumption that a good community garden must necessarily be inclusive or that, conversely, community gardens that are exclusionary are bad. We argue that framing community gardens as spaces of responsibility is another way to reengage with the epistemology of community gardens. Instead of only asking how, and to what extent, community gardens are inclusionary or exclusionary, we can augment our understanding of the realities of managing a garden by asking what responsibilities are associated with any given community garden. Among other things, the answer to this question requires one to trace the responsibilization process of gardeners. Through the case study of Singapore, we argue that responsibilization invariably engenders practices of inclusion and exclusion in community gardens. Framed thusly, we first move away from the reductive view that apparent exclusionary practices in a community garden render that garden to be normatively undesirable. Second, we can appreciate why many community gardens—even seemingly inclusive ones—have shades of exclusions embedded in them.
33-3919
Environment. Landscape architecture. Planning pedagogy. Public space.
Gramsci’s and Foucault’s readings of power provide critical illuminations for understanding the linkage of state formations to urbanization and the spatial production of subjectivity. This article uses Central Park to illustrate how a combination of their insights helps to elucidate the emergence of pedagogical spaces and environmental hegemonies. I first propose a conceptual framework drawing on diverse parallels and tensions in Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere and Foucault’s investigations in the 1970s, reassessed here from the vantage point of the implicit debate with Marxism in La société punitive. Urbanization and the built environment are theorized as material apparatuses of a form of capillary power that reconfigures the relations between state, civil society and individual subjects, striving to forge common senses of space that buttress political hegemony. This analytical toolkit is then applied in a political reappraisal of Central Park, exploring the role of design in the pedagogy of subaltern spatialities and the normalization of a consensual regime of publicity. The discussion pays special attention to the park’s assemblage of liberal and disciplinary spatial techniques, its connection to broader agencies beyond core state apparatuses, and their effect on the advent of an integral state formation.
36-5 LIFESTYLE
33-3920
Food. Health. Mobility. Youth.
We examine the everyday food practices of a group of high school students living in an urban, multicultural, and lower income community in San Diego, California. We integrate theoretical and empirical insights from research in health, food, and youth geographies and offer a relational conceptualization and analysis of the food environment that is sensitive to young people’s everyday mobilities and encounters with food. We pay particular attention to how young people journey through the local food landscape and navigate contradictions between food norms across places, including home, school, and neighborhood. Our goal is to uncover young people’s personal and emotional engagements with what, how, and where they eat. Our methodology begins by recognizing young people’s agency and centers on an analysis of the spatiality of their food routines. We present results of a year-long participatory study involving Global Positioning System–tagged photography, Photovoice interviews, and surveys. Our results provide a fine-grained analysis of young people’s daily engagements with their food environments and reveal how their food journeys are structured and governed by social relations, physical and material constraints, biopolitics, and emotional geographies. Our approach permits a critical and dynamic understanding of the food environment and its relationship to young people’s food practices, with useful insights for health research and policy.
33-3921
Development. Gender. Geopolitics.
At the heart of geopolitical concerns today are questions about life: the sustainability of life, the quality of life, and the biological capacity and resilience of life. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than in the contemporary partnership between security and socioeconomic development and aid. In Kurdish southeast Turkey, increased governmental investment in gendered development highlights the role of household, neighborhood, and community production and reproduction in processes of securitization and nation building. These events suggest a deeply corporeal geopolitics at play in Turkey’s Kurdish question, one that rests on the intimate relationship between social reproduction and geopolitics. This article draws on interview and participatory observation data in Diyarbakir, Turkey, to explain how specific practices and ideas around motherhood, marriage, and mobility and rights in the city create and challenge ethno-national identities. In doing so, I contend that the Kurdish question—and understandings of Turkishness and Kurdishness—are embodied, reified, and contested in the spatial constitutions of “life’s work.”
33-3922
Differences. Digital divide. Feminism. Human behavior.
Accounts by geographers of the ways in which urban spaces are digitally mediated have proliferated in the last few years. This significant body of work pays particular attention to the production of urban space by software and digital hardware, and geographers have drawn on various kinds of posthumanist philosophies to theorize the agency of the technological nonhuman. The agency of the human, however, has been left undertheorized in this work, often appearing in the form of excessive resistance to the agency granted to the digital. This article contributes to understanding the digital mediation of cities by theorizing a specifically posthuman agency; that is, a human agency both mediated through technics and diverse. Drawing on the philosophy of Stiegler as well as a range of feminist digital scholarship, the article conceptualizes posthuman agency as always already coconstituted with technologies. Posthumans are simultaneously individuated and exteriorized in that coconstitution, and this permits agency understood as reinvention. The article also insists that such sociotechnical agency is differentiated, particularly in terms of the spatialities and temporalities through which it is organized. It concludes by arguing that geographers must reconfigure their understanding of digitally mediated cities and acknowledge the inventiveness and diversity of urban posthuman agency.
33-3923
Landscape. Religion. Territory.
Many parts of the Himalaya are at once indigenous people’s homelands, national parks or conservation areas, world-renowned trekking and mountaineering destinations, and the sites of ongoing ecological and socioeconomic development interventions. In addition, for many residents, protective territory deities reside in nearby peaks, and valleys between provide sacred places of refuge. Like in mountain regions elsewhere, these meanings represent overlapping and entwined claims of authority and territory from the state, indigenous communities, development agencies, and religious institutions. In this article I consider the ways in which resident Sherpas in Khumbu, Nepal, negotiate the overlapping spaces, authorities, and territories associated with understandings of the region as Khumbi yullha’s—a local deity—territory and the Nyingma Buddhist institutional claim to the region as a beyul—a sacred, hidden valley refuge, which development actors, both inside and outside the Khumbu Sherpa community, have attempted to mobilize as a sacred landscape supporting environmental conservation initiatives. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in 2009 to 2010 and 2013, I focus on the spatiality of the cultural politics of religion in Khumbu in competing claims of territory from the Buddhist monastic institution and localized practices and the ways in which such constructions shape the outcomes of intervention programs.
36-6 QUALITY OF LIFE
33-3924
Landscape. Narrative analysis. Space.
A growing evidence base highlights “green” and “blue” spaces as examples of “therapeutic landscapes” incorporated into people’s lives to maintain a sense of well-being. A commonly overlooked dimension within this corpus of work concerns the dynamic nature of people’s therapeutic place assemblages over time. This article provides these novel temporal perspectives, drawing on the findings of an innovative three-stage interpretive geonarrative study conducted in southwest England from May to November 2013, designed to explore the complex spatial–temporal ordering of people’s lives. Activity maps produced using accelerometer and Global Positioning system (GPS) data were used to guide in-depth geonarrative interviews with thirty-three participants, followed by a subset of go-along interviews in therapeutic places deemed important by participants. Concepts of fleeting time, restorative time, and biographical time are used, alongside notions of individual agency, to examine participants’ green and blue space experiences in the context of the temporal structures characterizing their everyday lives and the biographical experiences contributing to the perceived importance of such settings over time. In a culture that by and large prioritizes speed, dominated by social ideals of, for example, the productive worker and the good parent, participants conveyed a desire to shift from fleeting time to restorative time, seeking a balance between embodied stillness and therapeutic mobility. This was deemed particularly important during more stressful life transitions, such as parenthood, employment shifts, and the onset of illness or impairment, when participants worked hard to tailor their therapeutic geographies to shifting well-being needs and priorities.
33-3925
Building design. Design. Health. Human activity. Interactive research. Knowledge. Public interest. Research.
It is increasingly evident that design needs to play a role in reducing sedentary behaviour through macro- and micro-environmental changes to the built environment. Recent research explores how various environments shape health and well-being of different populations, as the findings reported in the Building Research & Information special issue (volume 43/5) entitled ‘Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and the Indoor Built Environment’ exhibit. How can this research reach a wide audience, especially those in charge of making decisions around the design of indoor environments? Research and practice in the field of the built environment and health demands cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations and research results need to be appropriately communicated, translated and adapted for practical use. Practitioners can extrapolate from available research and consult best practices. Forging ahead with implementation also lends new opportunities to collaborate with researchers on evaluation.
33-3926
Health. Longitudinal. Migration. Neighborhoods.
There is long-standing evidence for the existence of geographical inequalities in health. Multiple conceptual frameworks have been proposed to explain why such patterns persist. The methodological design for these studies is often not appropriate for identifying causal effects of neighborhood context, however. It is possible that findings that show the importance of neighborhoods could be subject to confounding of individual-level factors, neighborhood sorting effects (i.e., health-selective migration), or both. We present an approach to investigating neighborhood-level factors that provides a stronger examination for causal effects, as well as addressing issues of confounding and sorting. We use individual-level data from the British Household Panel Survey (1995–2008). Individuals were grouped into quintiles based on the median house price of an individual’s lower super output area as our measure of neighborhood socioeconomic context. Multivariate propensity scores were used to match individuals to control for confounding factors, and logistic regression models were used to estimate the association between destination of migration and risk of poor health (up to ten years following migration). Initially, we found some evidence that poorer neighborhoods were associated with an increased risk of poor health. Following controlling for an individual’s health status prior to migration, the influence of neighborhood socioeconomic context was statistically nonsignificant. Our findings suggest that health-selective migration might help to explain the association between neighborhood-level factors and individual-level health. Our study design appears useful for both identifying causal effects of neighborhoods and accounting for health-selective migration.
33-3927
Analysis. Environmental concerns. Environmental justice. Health. Indicators. Urban areas.
The majority of human beings worldwide live in urban areas; hence, methods to assess the quality of the urban environment and its impact on human well-being are of the utmost importance. Particularly relevant are areas with low levels of environmental justice, defined as areas where low biophysical quality meets low socio-economic status, and where resources and strategies for coping are rare. This paper develops and applies an index to assess the patterns of environmental justice in residential areas with a strong focus on stakeholder integration. We concentrate on the relationship between socio-economic disparities of environmental burdens, such as traffic noise, and of environmental benefits, such as vegetation, in residential areas of Berlin, Germany. To develop an environmental justice index, we combined the environmental burdens and benefits with a socio-economic indicator. As a result, we identify city-wide patterns of environmental justice in Berlin. While there was a high positive correlation between vegetation and socio-economic status, the patterns for noise pollution were very heterogeneous. Our approach provides a transparent and modular index allowing an area-wide monitoring of environmental justice in urban areas. Such an analysis is urgently needed to develop adequate decision-making strategies for all inhabitants to make living in a healthier city possible.
33-3928
Africa. Conservation. Human rights. Labor markets.
Does everyone have the right to benefit from science? If so, what shape should benefits take? This article exposes the inequalities involved in bioprospecting through a relatively neglected human right, the right to benefit from science (HRS). Although underexplored in the literature, it is acknowledged that market-based conservation practices, such as bioprospecting, often rely on cheap “casual” labor. In contrast to critical discourses exposing the exploitation and misappropriation of indigenous people’s cultural and self-determination rights in relation to bioprospecting (i.e., biopiracy), the exploitation of a low-skilled labor force for science has been little examined from a human rights perspective. Reliance on cheap labor is not limited just to those directly involved in creating local biodiversity inventories but constitutes a whole set of other workers (cooks, porters, and logistical support staff), who contribute indirectly to the advancements of science and whose contribution is barely acknowledged, let alone financially remunerated. As precarious workers, it is difficult for laborers to use existing national and international labor laws to fight for recognition of their basic rights or easily to rely on biodiversity and environmental laws to negotiate recognition of their contribution to science. We explore to what extent the HRS can be used to encourage governments, civil society, and companies to provide basic labor and social rights to science. This should be of keen interest to geographers, who for the most part have limited engagement in human rights law, and has wider significance for those interested in exploitative labor and rights violations in the emerging bio- and green economy.
33-3929
Children. Data. Geographic information systems. Health. Spatial analysis. Toxic substances.
Recent headlines highlight disparities in childhood lead poisoning in urban areas yet discourse does not address the lack of primary prevention options. Previous geographic information systems (GIS) approaches, concentrated on census tracts or ZIP codes, miss contextual understanding of lead exposure and make intervention impractical. Through the combination of electronic medical record (EMR) data from an urban children’s hospital and spatial video geonarrative (SVG), we show how blood lead level researchers, clinicians, and public health planners can become more proactive in prediction and intervention strategies through the development of an environmental lead index (ELI). Kernel density estimation (KDE) clusters of geocoded locations of children with elevated blood lead (EBL), from 2012 to 2014, were identified using GIS. Analyses identify an increased relative risk for African American and Asian patients compared to white patients and Nepali and non-English-speaking patients compared to English-speaking patients. Fine-scale analyses of EBL clusters reveal nuances of exposure and environmental characteristics that are not identifiable at an aggregate level. Initial testing of the ELI was conducted using identified locations of EBL and non-EBL test results. The mean ELI score was higher among EBL parcels, and comparison proportions of ELI variables between EBL and non-EBL parcels found a statistically significant increase in four variables. Preliminary results support the use of the ELI as a predictive tool; further validation is needed. The technology and the method are translatable to other environments and health conditions.
33-3930
Asia. Children. Geopolitics. Peacekeeping.
This article focuses on the role and agency of children in shaping the trajectories and outcomes of peace in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Through the analysis of children’s narratives that are articulated around their vision maps of peace, I argue that such cartographic representations and dialogues of the everyday open up opportunities for them to critically reflect on their understandings of and hopes for peace. This essentially contributes to children’s formation as active geopolitical actors, allowing them to negotiate broader structures, relations, and identifications of violence to situate their aspirations for peace. Rather than viewing such embodied spatial practices as having no wider political implications, I showcase efforts that seek to mobilize children’s hopeful imag(in)ings for the harnessing of coalitional formations toward transformative possibilities. This enables the development of ethical relationships between local communities and other relevant stakeholders, leading to the formulation of appropriate strategies to stamp out the reproduction of violence across generations. In so doing, this article aligns to yet extends emerging literatures that cast attention on the different actors and their grounded enactments of peace. Specifically, it calls for the explicit acknowledgment of children’s involvement in the rethinking and remaking of issues pertaining to geopolitics (and peace) that should be seen as closely intertwined with the everyday lives of children throughout the world.