Abstract
HISTORY/THEORY/ADMINISTRATION
10. Planning History
10-1 GENERAL HISTORY
38-8507
head/tail breaks. hierarchy . living structure. livingness of space. structural beauty. substructures. wholeness.
According to Gestalt theory, any image is perceived subconsciously as a coherent structure (or whole) with two contrast substructures: figure and ground. The figure consists of numerous autogenerated substructures with an inherent hierarchy of far more smalls than larges. Through these substructures, the structural beauty of an image (L), or equivalently the livingness of space, can be computed by the multiplication of the number of substructures (S) and their inherent hierarchy (H). This definition implies that the more substructures something has, the more living or more structurally beautiful it is, and the higher the hierarchy of the substructures, the more living or more structurally beautiful. This is the nonrecursive approach to the structural beauty of images or the livingness of space. In this article we develop a recursive approach, which derives all substructures of an image (instead of its figure) and continues the deriving process for those decomposable substructures until none of them are decomposable. All of the substructures derived at different iterations (or recursive levels) together constitute a living structure; hence the notion of living images. We have applied the recursive approach to a set of images that have been previously studied in the literature and found that (1) the number of substructures of an image is far lower (3 percent on average) than the number of pixels and the centroids of the substructures can effectively capture the skeleton or saliency of the image; (2) all the images have a recursive level more than four, indicating that they are indeed living images; (3) no more than 3 percent of the substructures are decomposable, implying that a vast amount of the substructures are not decomposable; (4) structural beauty can be well measured by the recursively defined substructures, as well as their decomposable subsets. Despite a slightly higher computational cost, the recursive approach is proven to be more robust than the nonrecursive approach. The recursive approach and the nonrecursive approach both provide a powerful means to study the livingness or vitality of space in cities and communities.
38-8508
definition system. digital map processing techniques. ecological metrics. historical maps. hydromorphological feature. landscape change.
This article focuses on defining hydromorphological features to be extracted from historical maps by means of digital map processing techniques. The hydromorphological features, evolving through time, can be described quantitatively by the development and application of various ecological metrics to study the spatiotemporal change of the natural and built freshwater environment. With the goal to support future revitalization efforts, this article first reviews the theory on quantifying spatiotemporal change using landscape and ecological metrics, ranging from simple shape metrics (e.g., shoreline length) to more complex hydromorphological indexes (e.g., river braiding index). Second, the hydromorphological features themselves are important to consider in terms of data quality and uncertainty as they might inherit errors due to the low-quality maps, the extraction process, or due to poor definitions used during feature extraction efforts. Errors introduced by poorly defined features can be avoided by the use of a well-structured definition system. Thus, the article concludes in a new concept categorizing hydromorphological features and the changes they can undergo. The definition framework integrates novel perspectives for defining and evaluating features from the Siegfried and old Swiss national map, including key aspects from the theory.
10-3 HISTORY OF CITIES AND REGIONS
38-8509
climate change communication. critical cartography. data journalism. disinformation. map rhetoric.
Maps are a key way through which the science of climate change is communicated, but as partisan divides lead to new ideologically driven consumption patterns of news sources, it is important to understand how the media uses maps across the political spectrum. In this study, we investigate how maps have been incorporated into climate change communication in conservative media. Our research has two major findings. First, compared to mainstream media, conservative media is far less likely to use maps in reporting on climate change. We call this lack of maps a “cartographic silence,” borrowing and expanding on Harley’s term. Second, when conservative media uses maps, never do they create their own maps to accompany false arguments. Instead, these maps are republished from other media or peer-reviewed science, and reframed by logical fallacies. We conclude by offering suggestions about how scientists can improve their maps in hopes that they will be less susceptible to use in conservative disinformation efforts.
38-8510
cartogram. computational cartographic recognition. convolutional neural network. machine learning. Maps.
Map reading is a challenging task for computer programs. This article explores how artificial intelligence and machine learning methods can be used to understand maps, an area we broadly refer to as computational cartographic recognition. Specifically, we use machine learning methods to (1) identify whether an image is a map, (2) recognize the geographic region on the map, and (3) recognize the projection used on the map. Four machine learning models—support vector machine, multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) developed from scratch using our own architecture (CNNS), and pretrained CNN models through transfer learning (CNNT)—are applied in these tasks. We use 2,200 online map images, 500 nonmap images, and 1,050 synthetic map images to train and evaluate the models. Results show that the CNNT models achieve the highest performance among all models, with an accuracy rate above 90 percent for the tasks. The CNNS models come in second. We also conduct a round of stress tests using 3,600 additional synthetic maps where the shape and layout are systematically distorted and test if the models can still identify the maps and recognize the region and projection on the maps. The results of the stress tests show that the models can reliably recognize some of the modified maps even when exhibiting performance inferior to even random models for other maps. This unpredictable nature of the methods when applied to maps that are not represented in the training data suggests both promises and limitations of the current machine learning approaches to cartographic recognition.
38-8511
concept of territory . ontological origins. Russian political geographic traditions. state-centric enclosure. statist and organic readings of territory.
The idea of territory as a bounded, state-centric enclosure has been recently confronted with the help of decolonial insights. This article attempts to overcome the resultant dichotomies between the statist and organic readings of territory by demonstrating how the making of the Russian state has been contingent on decolonial narratives and territorial imaginaries that have far exceeded the notions of the state as such. The Russian political geographic traditions have historically allowed for the coexistence of multiple and heterogeneous conceptions of territory, which were varyingly assembled to fit specific geopolitical intentions. This article delineates three ontological origins of the Russian territory that have consequently played a key part in shaping the Russian territorial politics: (1) the ontology of commoning, deriving inspiration from communal land use and the collective autonomy of the peasant society; (2) the ontology of assembling, grounded in the anthropogeographical imaginary of the “borderless” Eurasian landmass and its nomadic livelihoods; and (3) the ontology of peopling, grounded in the taxonomies of modernization and rational distribution of human subjects. Scrutinizing the interplay of these ontologies extends the understanding of the porosity and plurality of the concept of territory and offers insights into the roots of Russia’s own geopolitical worldviews and their coloniality.
10-4 HISTORY OF THE PROFESSION
38-8512
early adulthood. geographical context. latent class. life course. Sweden. trajectories.
This article explores typical life-course trajectories based on annual observations of educational participation, employment, and establishing a family from age sixteen to age thirty. Using latent class analysis, we identify seven different trajectory classes that capture the different life courses experienced by individuals born in 1986. Examples of trajectory classes are (1) an early partner and childbearing trajectory; (2) a trajectory that mixes employment and a long postsecondary education into the later twenties; and (3) a trajectory involving low activity, very little employment, very little postsecondary education, and not starting a family. The classes identified correspond closely to trajectories found in earlier qualitative studies using life-history interviews, but in contrast to these studies that each encompass a few dozen individuals or less, our approach identifies trajectories for the individuals of an entire birth cohort. This allows for analysis of the geographical distribution of trajectories across regions, municipality types, and neighborhoods. Individuals following long postsecondary education trajectories were heavily concentrated in metropolitan areas and university towns. At the same age, individuals following early childbearing trajectories were concentrated instead in peripheral, rural areas. Individuals from nonmetropolitan areas also tend to follow more gender-polarized trajectories. Moreover, we find that there is more trajectory-based segregation at age thirty than at age fifteen. Theoretically, our study gives support to the idea that places are structured on the basis of life-course trajectories. Local context influences how individuals are linked into different trajectories and, at the same time, the spatial sorting of trajectories will shape local contexts.
11. Concepts of Planning
11-1 APPROACHES (COMPREHENSIVE/STRATEGIC/COLLABORATIVE)
38-8513
Co-creation. institutional capacity building. intellectual capital. political capital. Social capital.
To cope with the multi-faceted challenges our world is increasingly confronted with, new planning approaches aimed at integration and collaboration are adopted. Co-creation is one of them. In literature, co-creation is described as facilitating innovation and creativity. Similar to other collaborative approaches, it can build institutional capacity and thereby adaptivity for coping with current challenges. Through an in-depth study of the case of replanning the Hegewarren polder in the Netherlands, we show that a co-creation process can support the development of institutional capacity by enhancing its three components – intellectual, social, and political capital.
38-8514
Dominican Republic. informal settlements. infrastructure development. Latin America. memory. storytelling in planning.
Memory-based storytelling may contribute to co-productive planning approaches based on endogenous epistemologies and ways of being. Specifically, ambivalent memory performances, emerging from the embodied and emplaced memory of the speaker, reveal contested community histories, serve as a source of critical learning, and foster diverse forms of claims-making. By drawing on the case of a stormwater development project in the informal settlement of Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, this article considers the production of dissonant memory landscapes through ambivalent testimonies of community histories, illuminating the implications of such memory work for storytelling in community-based planning practice.
11-2 PLANNING THEORIES
38-8515
digital disconnection. digital geographies. disentangling. Geographical attention. Place. territoriality.
People adopt geographical strategies to distance themselves from digital sociality. Rather than merely turning off devices, they engage in a broader, more durable project of disentangling. This effort responds to the homogenizing, standardizing forces of connective media and their coercive entanglements: socially normalized routines of personal media use, hybridizations of human agency with communication technologies, and digitally mediated activities that generate predictive and prescriptive products. Geographical attention to disentangling is merited by the fact that it comes in local variants and brings questions of place and human territoriality back onto the agenda in significantly new ways as part of a postdigital territoriality. We offer two vignettes revealing place’s role as protective, with its territoriality drawing a line around the self. We argue that postdigital territoriality inevitably reflects a differentiated terrain of gender, income, profession, and other elements of positionality.
38-8516
Complexity theory. ethics of care. model of responsibility. Planning theory.
The search for a good planning theory to underpin just and effective practice, and thereby narrow the growing gap between theory and practice, has been central to literature on planning since the mid-twentieth century. This paper brings together three seemingly unrelated urban planning perspectives and shows that combining them could provide a complete, feasible approach to planning. Complexity theory offers code-based planning regulations appropriate for multi-agent urban dynamics. The responsibility model contributes negotiation-based decision-making suitable for situations with multiple agents. Ethics of care outlines how to evaluate planning tools and policies in ways that dignify all human agents.
11-4 PLANNING EDUCATION
38-8517
Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. housing researchers. photo display. workshops.
I had a little bit of a meltdown at a coffee break during the recent meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning – North America’s gathering of university planning faculty. It’s not typically a high-key emotional atmosphere, but I was truly thrown for a loop by a photo display of past meetings. There I was, among colleagues, as we hosted the 2016 meeting in Portland. In the picture, taken about two weeks before the U.S. election, we are all grinning widely. I had passed out lapel pins with Michelle Obama making a side-eye face to all the members of the Faculty Women’s Interest Group and the Planners of Color; we were holding joint workshops and enjoying the ever-increasing diversity of the Association. My fellow housing researchers had big plans to push forward the fair housing agenda, forty years overdue but finally resurrected; likewise environmental justice and taking climate change seriously were surely solidly prioritized.
38-8518
contested communities. Service learning. Technology-Oriented Community-Engaged Learning (TOCEL). underserved communities. urban planning practice.
Drawing on a Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) class with the community of Jisr Azzarqa, this paper examines the engagement with technology in urban planning practice. The paper argues that a CEL that utilizes advanced and situated technology, that is, Technology Oriented CEL (TOCEL), advances reciprocity in collaborations with underserved communities by developing trustworthy relationships, mutual learning, and crossing social, cultural, and geographical boundaries. The conclusion suggests that TOCEL pedagogy educates planners to work inclusively, better engage with communities, and implement decolonized practices. Moreover, it is suggested that applications of diverse technology in traditional planning processes can advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
11-5 APPLICATIONS/TECHNIQUES
38-8519
communicative principles. digital engagement. Digital Participation Model. Planning. Public participation.
This paper critically and empirically explores how planning professionals understand a digital engagement tool and its use in effective and meaningful public participation. Through a series of focus groups where planners engaged with a Digital Participation Model (DPM), the research studied the functionality of this digital tool in relation to key communicative principles such as communication, comprehension and transparency. In doing so, this paper contributes to critical literature on the implications and politics of generalised technology developments for planning participation. Additionally, it offers a conceptual lens to critically guide application of digital engagement tools with the aim of reducing the risk that new technology dictates how we understand participatory engagement.
11-7 CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
38-8520
department-like unit. feminist geography. Gender. Higher education. quantitative geography.
Women and gender minorities are underrepresented in positions of leadership and seniority in academia. Research on gender in higher education (HE) has varied in scale and methodological approach from large-scale global surveys to small-scale projects with interviews and focus groups, with a noticeable gap in the attention given to early career researchers and doctoral students, and the ways in which their experiences can vary significantly from discipline to discipline, institution to institution, and “department-like unit” to “department-like unit.” Drawing on gender theory to link gender to power and gendered organizations, we connect this theoretical perspective to research on gender in HE. This article proposes a new agenda to develop our understanding of gender in HE by drawing together quantitative and feminist geography to focus on the issue at different “palatial” scales within HE. We propose expanding the definition of gender often used in quantitative research and to consider intersectionality, using open source data to provide novel and reproducible insights into the dynamics of gender in HE, and using quantitative geography methods to develop a multiscalar understanding of these dynamics.
38-8521
margins . Migrants. model citizenship. Muslim minorities. partial secularisms. secular . Singapore.
This article argues that the secular should be understood as a partial construct that is selectively deployed by individuals to structure everyday encounters with difference. The partiality of the secular is pronounced in Muslim minority contexts, in which Muslims must negotiate varying degrees of ontological incompatibility between their religious and nonreligious selves. How religious and secular understandings of “model” citizenship are negotiated throughout the spaces and aspirations of everyday life can provide insight into the partiality of the secular, and how such partiality can create difference where there might otherwise be unity. We illustrate these ideas through an empirical exploration of Singapore’s Muslim minorities. In Singapore, the Muslim population is primarily Malay, but includes non-Malay cohorts as well. Bangladeshi migrant workers form an important minority, as their visa status precludes them from becoming Singapore citizens, and thus removes them from the direct secular structuring of the state. In the mosque, the interfacing of Singaporean Muslims on the one hand, and Bangladeshi Muslims on the other, yields important insights into the assertions of citizenship, and the negotiation of selfhood, that occurs at the religious margins of a state-defined secular society.
38-8522
China. green exposure. neighborhood effect averaging problem. neighborhood effect polarization problem. neighborhood environment.
The neighborhood effect averaging problem (NEAP) points out that the effect and statistical significance of mobility-dependent environmental exposure on health behaviors or outcomes by the residence-based approach might be overestimated compared with the exposure estimates considering daily mobility. NEAP studies, however, are recently only proven in pollution and congestion exposure. The neighborhood effect bias might have another form in other environmental exposures, the neighborhood effect polarization problem (NEPP), which describes the situation where the overall trend of mobile exposure is more polarized than residential exposure. Taking green exposure as a typical case, 554 Beijing residents were studied regarding the relationship between residence- and mobility-based green exposures. After controlling socioeconomic factors, time, and other built environmental factors, the cluster robust logit and ordinary least squares models combined with the parameter test were used to discuss the neighborhood effect trend of green exposure under the background of mobility. The results show the following: (1) NEPP exists in green exposure; (2) NEPP is most likely to occur when residential green space is measured by accessibility and visibility; and (3) the green demand of residential green advantaged groups is higher, which is the potential cause of NEPP. This study demonstrates the existence of NEPP and reveals another form of neighborhood health effect bias and potentially more serious environmental justice problems that exist in the travel environment.
12. Policy and Planning Administration
12-2 CITY MANAGEMENT
38-8523
Competition. cultural political economy. Electricity. Energy. monopoly. regulatory capture.
Although much of the U.S. electricity system moved to deregulated markets in the late 1990s, states in the southeastern United States—home to the nation’s largest, most valuable, and most polluting utilities—chose to retain regulated monopolies. In this article, we draw on interviews with regulators, environmental organizations, lobbyists, and utility executives to examine how utilities in the southeastern United States have maintained their position as monopolies in the face of calls for competition in the 1990s and again in the 2020s. We ground our inquiry in geographical political economy, with attention to the role that law plays in balancing monopoly and competition in electricity provision and capitalism more broadly. Our research suggests that the cultural political economy of energy regulation in the Southeast has played a central role in enabling electric utilities to maintain their monopoly position, with utilities using their relationships with regulators to parlay their monopoly preference into narratives of monopoly-as-consumer-protection. We therefore offer insights regarding long-debated mechanisms of regulatory capture, highlighting how the structure of public utility law creates opportunities for political and personal relationships to overpower general ideological commitments to competition. These findings demonstrate how law is deployed as a mediating tool of capitalist relations.
38-8524
business closure. COVID-19 pandemic. Miami. Suburbanization. urban spatial structure.
The COVID-19 pandemic altered the local economic geographies of many U.S. cities, and it remains unclear how long these changes will persist. This study analyzed the sociospatial dynamics of business closures in Miami-Dade County, Florida, from August 2020 to August 2021 with an explicit focus on reconciling the pandemic’s effects in the context of location theory. We found that traditional urban centers and transit-concentrated areas experienced disproportionately higher rates of business closures during the study period, suggesting a potential wave of commercial suburbanization in Miami. Middle-class and working-class Hispanic neighborhoods suffered the most business closures. The results of correlation analysis and spatial regression models suggested a positive association between the incidence of COVID-19 cases and business closures at both zip code and individual business levels. These results also beckon a revaluation of the role of certain urban externalities in traditional location theory. The importance of automobile accessibility and agglomeration effects are poised to persist beyond the pandemic, but the benefits of proximity to the public transport system might decline. The trends observed in Miami suggest that the pandemic could generate more automobile-reliant employment subcenters in U.S. cities and amplify problems of intraurban inequality and urban sprawl.
12-5 POLITICS AND PLANNING
38-8525
expectations. future. participatory planning. recalibrations. The Netherlands.
Spatial planning is an inherently future-oriented practice charged with future expectations. Strikingly, the productive role of these expectations has received little scholarly attention. We adopted a grounded theory approach to study the participatory planning process for Seelig Park in Breda, the Netherlands. We observed that expectations are flexible, dynamic and diverse and they can be tuned to fit and justify actions and decisions while keeping the planning process in motion. We conclude that expectations become productive as a means for ‘recalibration,’ reflecting the continuous quest for equilibrium between action and legitimacy in the politically negotiated context of spatial planning.
12-6 MUNICIPAL/PUBLIC SERVICES
38-8526
agriculture. black-grass. disease geographies. integrated pest management. Pathogenesis. pests.
This article explores approaches to managing pests that are being developed in response to the faltering effectiveness of antibiotic regimes of chemical control. It focuses on black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides), an endemic plant in European agriculture that has emerged as a serious yield-robber with increasing levels of herbicidal resistance. Following farmers and agronomists who have developed “integrated” approaches to black-grass management, the article identifies approaches to biosecurity that do not target unwanted life so much as they modulate ecological systems in their entirety. Pathogenesis, in this relational understanding, follows not from breaches of dangerous life into healthy space, but from ecological intra-actions that enable the proliferation of some life to compromise the multispecies livability of the body in question. The article contributes to the literature by detailing how this configurational approach works in the world. It traces the polymorphic spatial imaginaries required to map pests well; the process of knowledge intensification needed to reveal which configurations can resist pathogenesis; and the probiotic biopolitical interventions used to safeguard farmland productivity. The article uses black-grass to present a temporal metanarrative of intensive farming causing ecological blowback, leading to the development of approaches to pest management predicated on a pragmatic tolerance toward unwanted life.
13. Planning Law and Legislation
13-2 LAND USE CONTROLS
38-8527
dendrochronology. European American settlement. fire history. mesophication. Pinus echinata. Quercus alba.
In the interior highlands of the eastern United States, there is evidence that fire was frequent in some forests during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before declining drastically in the twentieth century. To better understand past fire regimes and how they shaped forest dynamics during periods of change, we conducted a dendroecological study at Lake Winona Research Natural Area (LWRNA), a 110-ha unlogged forest dominated by shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata Mill.) in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. We used remnant wood and living tree cores to construct a multicentury record of fire occurrence and tree recruitment. Our results indicate the forest at LWRNA passed through multiple fire regime transitions that altered forest dynamics. During the protohistoric period (1701–1834), prior to widespread European American settlement (EAS), fire was frequent, but limited sample depth results in greater uncertainty regarding fire frequency and forest conditions. During EAS (1835–1929), fire was very frequent and tree establishment was dominated by shortleaf pine. After 1930, effective fire protection led to establishment shifting toward increasingly fire-intolerant hardwoods. Evidence of temporal variations in the fire regime, age structure, and contemporary composition broaden our understanding of reference conditions in this pine-oak forest and demonstrate that fire management could be used to restore a range of vegetation conditions from frequently burned pine- and oak-dominated woodlands to fire-excluded, closed-canopy mesophytic communities.
38-8528
Enchanted Rock. gnamma. photo-monitoring. repeat photography. rephotography. vernal pool.
This study focuses on photographic analysis of Enchanted Rock, a granite dome in central Texas; fourteen photo pairs compare contrasting views after—thirty-six to forty-six?years, and assess changes in geomorphology, sediments, and vegetation on miniature landforms, especially erosional depressions—gnammas and vernal pools. Several distinct landscape changes occurred during the study period, but these affected sites unevenly. Vegetation displayed noticeable differences in plant density and species, particularly a pronounced increase of Opuntia cacti and woody shrubs on several depressions; these changes, however, are not considered permanent, and are interpreted as representing periodic fluctuations due to climatic oscillations such as recurrent drought. Among geomorphic features, a rock pedestal and a tafoni panel—displaying friable, crumbling, material—are seemingly being rapidly obliterated by weathering; their low compressive strength (Schmidt hammer) R values support this idea. In contrast, a large, isolated, boulder near the dome base did not—as anticipated—display any obvious changes. Large stones and gravelly sediments, accumulated on vernal pools, or deposited along rill channels between depressions, showed the most conspicuous alterations. The observed changes are arranged along a presumed developmental sequence portraying subsequent geomorphic stages during pool development, which occur as detached stones gradually weather and eventually disintegrate; both coarse and fine sediments are transported downslope during intense, infrequent rainfall events. Pools, gnammas, rills, sediments, and vegetation function on Enchanted Rock as interconnected geographical units and components of an elaborate drainage network, steadily affecting each other over space and time.
14. Planning and Society
14-1 POVERTY
38-8529
census microdata. COVID-19 pandemic. multidimensional poverty. poverty measurement. United States.
The accurate accounting of where and for whom deprivations occur is fundamental to addressing poverty. In the United States, the official poverty measure considers only a person’s income, although poverty is increasingly understood internationally as a set of multiple, interlinked deprivations. This article introduces a decomposable multidimensional poverty (MDP) measure that addresses these shortcomings by using thirteen American Community Survey microdata indicators to identify education, health, housing, and economic security deprivations for individuals. In 2017, the national poverty rate was 13.7 percent when measured using MDP and 13.1 percent using official poverty. Although similar at the national scale, Hispanic, Asian, and older persons had higher poverty rates using the multidimensional measure, whereas Black and young persons had higher rates when using official poverty. MDP tended to be higher than official poverty in dense urban areas, whereas official poverty tended to be higher in rural areas. Further, MDP was a stronger correlate with COVID-19 death rates than official poverty through the first three waves of the pandemic. The design of MDP recognizes that individuals can experience poverty in different ways and provides a more holistic view of people and places.
38-8530
educational assessment. educational equity. Multilevel models. Neighborhood effects. opportunity to learn.
The ideal of U.S. public education as “a great equalizer” remains unrealized across large swaths of the country. Young people in schools are at varying levels of educational advantage and disadvantage owing to wide gaps in learning opportunities and disparate access to high-quality curriculum. Unequal educational achievement has also been linked to inequities affecting some students before they enter school due to socioeconomic circumstances, prejudice, and discriminatory social systems and structures. In this study, we begin to partition the various factors that account for inequality in student outcomes in the context of U.S. geography education. Using large-scale data sets provided by the National Center for Education Statistics within the U.S. Department of Education, we developed a two-level statistical model to analyze the extent to which geography achievement in eighth grade varies systematically with contextual opportunity to learn (OTL) factors and the relative poverty level of neighborhoods around schools. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to account for data clustering, producing an achievement estimate for each predictor and controlling for the effects of all other predictors. Statistically significant OTL predictors included instructional exposure, taking geography prior to eighth grade, teaching experience, and the availability of computers in classrooms. Schools located in neighborhoods with higher income-to-poverty ratios outperformed schools in neighborhoods closer to the federal poverty threshold. Controlling for OTL and school neighborhood effects accounted for some of the geography achievement disadvantage associated with race and other student characteristics. Geographers can further explore these relationships with formal mediational models and educational programs based on equity-oriented frameworks.
14-2 DISCRIMINATION/DESEGREGATION/INTEGRATION
38-8531
care. feminist care ethics. Race. urban parks.
In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid birder in New York City’s Central Park, was reported to the police by Amy Cooper, a White woman enraged at his request that she leash her dog. His cell phone recording of the encounter generated immediate national outcry and she faced misdemeanor charges—later dropped—for making a false report. On one level, the event is a depressingly familiar story, one of many devastatingly common incidents in which White women’s vulnerability is weaponized and wielded against Black people in public space to potentially lethal ends. It also serves as a stark reminder of the ways that racism continues to shape and structure relationships with urban park space in the United States, through practices of social control ranging from official policing and permits to informal surveillance. On another level, however, the incident also raises novel questions about what it might mean to theorize parks—as sites of refuge, recreation, protest, and surveillance—in terms of a more-than-human ethic of care and caring relations. Through a rereading of this incident, we argue for conceptualizing parks both as spaces of social control and as spaces of care, and we show how racism fundamentally shapes conflicts over caring practices and the rules that govern them.
38-8532
care. feminist care ethics. Race. urban parks.
In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid birder in New York City’s Central Park, was reported to the police by Amy Cooper, a White woman enraged at his request that she leash her dog. His cell phone recording of the encounter generated immediate national outcry and she faced misdemeanor charges—later dropped—for making a false report. On one level, the event is a depressingly familiar story, one of many devastatingly common incidents in which White women’s vulnerability is weaponized and wielded against Black people in public space to potentially lethal ends. It also serves as a stark reminder of the ways that racism continues to shape and structure relationships with urban park space in the United States, through practices of social control ranging from official policing and permits to informal surveillance. On another level, however, the incident also raises novel questions about what it might mean to theorize parks—as sites of refuge, recreation, protest, and surveillance—in terms of a more-than-human ethic of care and caring relations. Through a rereading of this incident, we argue for conceptualizing parks both as spaces of social control and as spaces of care, and we show how racism fundamentally shapes conflicts over caring practices and the rules that govern them.
38-8533
Ambedkar’s critique. anti-caste tradition. Brahmanical conceptions. egalitarian vision. permanence and spatiotemporal fixity.
Responding to recent calls to rethink space, nature, and social difference outside of North American frameworks, this article draws on the anti-caste tradition in India to explore critiques of hierarchical “natures.” It focuses on the thought of the towering anti-caste leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), who put forward an egalitarian critique of Brahmanical (upper caste) philosophy’s emphasis on permanence and spatiotemporal fixity. The article situates Ambedkar’s critique in the doubly colonial—British and Brahman—context in which he formulated his thought, and emphasizes Ambedkar’s attempts to effect an epistemic break from Brahmanical conceptions of the world, including caste-based conceptions of space and nature. This critique, which is part of a broader tradition of anti-caste thought in western India, has received scant attention in international scholarship on nature and hierarchy. This tradition, the article argues, contains the seeds of an ecologically attuned anti-caste critique and can open new avenues for strengthening anti-caste/anti-racist solidarities. It particularly resonates with the works of Sylvia Wynter and those who have built on her insights about the struggle to define the human, and by extension, the nonhuman. This points toward egalitarian visions of ecology that break away from the fixity (or, more strongly, captivity) that characterizes hierarchical conceptions of nature.
38-8534
agriculture. Black geographies. marronage. nature. oral history. quilombos.
In this work, I focus on how Quilombolas in southern Brazil create territorial conceptions and practices. Contemporary quilombos constitute complex forms of social organization composed of different collectivities and political subjectivities whose ancestors resisted colonial slavery by creating free communities in urban and rural spaces. In Serra dos Tapes, rural Black Quilombola communities have struggled with geographic dispossession, socioeconomic inequalities, and everyday racism. At the same time, they have created space-making practices, thinking of their territory as a lived space. Agriculture plays an essential role in this process, articulating knowledge, creativity, and a unique relationship to nature. Black people in Serra dos Tapes consider the cultivation and their relation to nature meaningful in the constitution of their identities, food security, and autonomy. Results of this study were gained through the life history method. Taking Quilombolas’ practices, narratives, and trajectories seriously in their political and epistemological importance, this article aims to offer some insights to advance discussions concerning the entanglement of race, nature, and environment within geographical studies.
38-8535
Black geographies. COVID-19 pandemic. Geographic information systems. geospatial big data. human mobility. humanistic GIS.
Black communities in the United States have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic; however, few empirical studies have been conducted to examine the conditions of Black-owned businesses in the United States during this challenging time. In this article, we assess the circumstances of Black-owned restaurants during the entire year of 2020 through a longitudinal quantitative analysis of restaurant patronage. Using multiple sources of geospatial big data, the analysis reveals that most Black-owned restaurants in this study are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic among different cities in the United States over time. The finding reveals the need for a more in-depth understanding of Black-owned restaurants’ situations during the pandemic and further indicates the significance of carrying out place-based relief strategies. Our findings also urge big tech companies to improve existing Black-owned business campaigns to enable sustainable support. As the first to systematically examine the racialization of locational information, this article implies that geographic information systems (GIS) development should not be detached from human experience, especially that of minorities. A humanistic rewiring of GIS is envisioned to achieve a more racially equitable world.
38-8536
Black geographies. Environment. Legal geography. marronage. plantation power. White supremacist violence.
Since the U.S. antebellum era, enslaved and free Black people established places of their own to defend against White supremacist violence. These communities often formed on perilous landscapes, spaces considered undesirable, inaccessible, and uninhabitable by White planter classes. This form of fugitivity persisted after the postbellum era, and recurs in various forms in the present day, commonly through the formation of legally sanctioned Black communities. The rationales for contemporary incorporation of Black towns share similarities with their maroon predecessors—localized power and figurative escape from the whims of White governance. Using archival data, public databases, and secondary sources on Princeville, North Carolina, I argue that Black towns are not “towns” in the same way that White-founded towns exist in the United States, not only because of the persistent forms of violence leveled at them, but also because ontologically, Black towns do not develop from the same experiences and purposes as White towns. Despite their formal recognition by the state or other forms of legal status, Black towns often resemble their predecessors, maroon communities, which were extralegal spaces of freedom and alternative land relation formed in resistance to slavery in the West, beginning in the sixteenth century. The Town of Princeville established models of land and community relations that supersede capitalist development paradigms undergirding the municipality. This research builds on previous studies of contemporary plantation power relations, marronage, and Black place development and proposes alternative modes of place based on lessons from Princeville.
14-3 SPECIAL POPULATIONS/SOCIAL WELFARE
38-8537
gay village. hegemonic masculinity. LGBTQ2+. queer geographies. Race. trans geographies.
Little geographical work has explored the role of hegemonic gay masculinity in constructing queer spaces and its impacts on multiply marginalized lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit, and additional (LGBTQ2+) people. Building on interviews with LGBTQ2+ youth experiencing homelessness, and photographs taken by them, this article investigates how hegemonic gay masculinity materializes in visual representations of gendered bodies throughout Toronto’s gay village, and how this is reflected in feminine and trans or gender non-conforming (TGNC) youth’s social experiences of the neighborhood. Through a framework of hegemonic masculinity, gender and race are understood as co-constitutive and read simultaneously in the queer geographical productions of gendered inclusions and exclusions among LGBTQ2+ youth experiencing homelessness. This article analyzes how hegemonic gay masculinity links queer spaces to various structures of power through visual cultures, including whiteness, cisnormativity, nationalism, and able-bodiedness, and the implications of this in the everyday social relations of feminine and TGNC youth experiencing homelessness. Through this exploration, this article presents how visual representations of gendered bodies communicate hegemonic masculinity in built queer environments, instruct varying forms of gendered and racialized inclusions and exclusions, and (re)produce a sense of unbelonging for some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ2+ community.
38-8538
everyday life. exhaustion. potentiality. temporality. transgender youth.
In this article, young trans people share their experiences of exhaustion and exhausting temporalities. Drawing on participatory research with young trans people aged fourteen to twenty-five in London and Scotland, I trace forces implicated in the spatial and bodily emergence and fixity of exhaustion in young trans people’s lives to the sociomaterialities, embodied practices, and architectures of many everyday spaces, alongside societal hostilities, as a set of forces that often (attempt to) erode their agency and contribute to their “out-of-placeness.” I also undertake a queer reconceptualizing of the condition that emphasizes the specificities of the bodies, subject positions, and spatial interactions of exhausted people. Crucially, this reconceptualization recognizes that experiencing and embodying exhaustion can, perhaps paradoxically, initiate and make possible myriad potentialities, complicating academic work that positions exhaustion as the removal of possibility. The article reflects on the radical flourishing of trans youth lives, spaces, solidarities, and euphoric experiences by exploring participants’ (re)making of resilient, resistive, and restorative subjectivities, embodiments, and spatialities within exhaustion’s spatial and temporal pervasiveness. By illuminating exhaustion’s nonlinear, messy, and prolonged temporalities, I observe that such temporalities constitute a function of lived exhaustion while paradoxically providing conditions for such empowering, expansive, and often queer and transspecific potentialities.
14-4 URBAN SOCIOLOGY
38-8539
deep learning. physical disorder. street view image. theoretical contributions. urban street space.
Physical disorder is associated with negative outcomes in economic performance, public health, and social stability, such as the depreciation of property, mental stress, fear, and crime. A limited but growing body of literature considers physical disorder in urban space, especially the topic of identifying physical disorder at a fine scale. There is currently no effective and replicable way of measuring physical disorder at a fine scale for a large area with low cost, however. To fill the gap, this article proposes an approach that takes advantage of the massive volume of street view images as input data for virtual audits and uses a deep learning model to quantitatively measure the physical disorder of urban street spaces. The results of implementing this approach with more than 700,000 streets in Chinese cities—which, to our knowledge, is the first attempt globally to quantify the physical disorder in such large urban areas—validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach. Through this large-scale empirical analysis in China, this article makes several theoretical contributions. First, we expand the factors of physical disorder, which were previously neglected in U.S. studies. Second, we find that urban physical disorder presents three typical spatial distributions—scattered, diffused, and linear concentrated patterns—which provide references for revealing the development trends of physical disorder and making spatial interventions. Finally, our regression analysis between physical disorder and street characteristics identified the factors that could affect physical disorder and thus enriched the theoretical underpinnings.
38-8540
China. gravity model. intercity mobility. location-based service data. Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation.
Whereas much academic effort has been devoted to the physics and geographies of daily intraregion individual movements using new big data on human locations, systematic econometric modeling of the spatiotemporal logic of periodic interregional mobility has received limited attention. Using a multiyear, location-based service data set of daily intercity mobility from the Internet company Tencent, this study systematically examines China’s intercity mobility patterns between 2015 and 2019 for the first time. Following a conceptual framework, a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation (PPML) gravity approach is applied. It reveals a stable “diamond” pattern of high-value mobility flows among the four vertexes of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou/Shenzhen, and Chengdu, embedding radiation patterns of flows connecting some large cities to their neighbors. The econometric results indicate the influence of gravity factors, short-term trips, long-term mobility tendencies, and transportation facilities. Factors of origin and destination exert the same effects on mobility, implying a circulation character. Results of subsample heterogeneity analysis (urban agglomerations vs. nonurban agglomerations, larger cities vs. smaller cities) and the moderating effects of time, distance, and economy are discussed. Our findings reveal differences between intercity mobility and traditional migration under the hukou system and propose implications for urban governance in the postepidemic era.
38-8541
Kampala and Nairobi. people as infrastructure. post-Western ontologies and knowledge systems. urban environmentalism. urban youth.
The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the “humanistic” core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. First, we synthesize urban environmentalism debates and their embattled relationship with humanistic concerns; second, we illuminate everyday creative interventions that urban youth themselves are generating in their continual negotiations between individual and social, old and new, vernacular and technical; and third, we deflect the linear projection of a “Capitalocene” future by exhibiting contingent practices of southern urbanism. Accordingly, we propose new ways of reinventing urban environmentalism that see humans as a part of its divergent future landscapes. Our version of humanistic city frames the urban as a provisional space in which youth socialities and sensibilities are seen as emerging potentialities calibrating the pace of spatial transitions.
38-8542
Infrastructure. Los Angeles. material politics. urban gardens. Water.
Historically, urban developers, politicians, and public water utilities have invented Los Angeles as a semitropical oasis in a dry climate. During the California drought of 2011 through 2016, however, the city’s residential gardens became a new frontier of water conservation policy. Water agencies started to subsidize the replacement of lushly irrigated lawns with California Friendly® landscapes, thereby endorsing a technology-centered “infrastructuring” of gardens to increase water conservation. This approach contrasts with California native plant gardening promoted by nature conservationists, which uses vernacular horticultural techniques to restore native plant biodiversity and reduce irrigation. The article shows that each approach has important political implications for urban space and water use, the value accorded to nature and gardening work, and relations between citizens and experts. Analyzing the differences between these approaches, we critically interrogate Los Angeles’s modern infrastructure regime that shapes water conservation policy. Particular attention is paid to how new material objects, knowledges, and practices in gardening recompose relationships between water, plants, technology, humans, and urban space. We argue that the notion of infrastructuring gardens offers a fruitful lens for ascertaining how expert cultures shape urban environmental change and how alternative gardening practices (re)produce urban nature differently.
38-8543
best practice. coproduction. Experimental urbanism. Latin America. urban laboratories.
Urban laboratories are gaining popularity in Latin America as spaces of experimentation within urban planning. Based on semi-structured interviews across Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, we identify two tensions behind the current proliferation of urban laboratories in Latin America. Firstly, the temporary and informal nature of urban laboratories, while promoting innovative thinking and experimentation, limits their long-term impact. Secondly, their reliance on international best practices and highly educated “trendy urbanists” often hinder their ability to foster more democratic and inclusive outcomes. We conclude by reflecting how these tensions highlight larger challenges in realizing the transformative potential of experimental approaches to planning.
38-8544
deal-based policy. Evaluation. governance. Strategic planning. urban intrapreneurialism.
This paper examines ‘deal-based’ policy responses to local and sub-regional governance dilemmas, drawing on issues around strategic planning policy in Oxfordshire, UK. Deal-based policy is conceptualised as a form of urban intrapreneurialism, explicitly designed to cultivate change within local state operations and to promote associated organisational innovation, institutional proactivity, and policy reorientation. A general evaluative frame for urban intrapreneurialism is derived and then deployed for the Oxfordshire case, assessing the extent to which deal-based policy is able to respond to the distinctive and challenging set of governance dilemmas which pertain. Finally, broader conceptual and policy implications are discussed.
38-8545
animal geography. coyote. more-than-human geographies. multispecies city. rhythmanalysis.
This article advances a more-than-human everyday urbanism as a useful analytic for articulating a less anthropocentric reading of the city. Using a case study of eastern coyotes (Canis latrans) in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, it draws on empirical data and ethological literatures to consider everyday life in multispecies cities through two registers: rhythms and sensoria. It first performs an experimental rhythmanalysis, demonstrating the import of linear and cyclical rhythms in the space-times of human–coyote encounters. It then delves into coyote sensory worlds, illustrating the acoustic and olfactory ecologies that shape urban atmospheres and place-making. The article argues that a more-than-human everyday urbanism holds value for practice and politics, shifting the focus from spectacular moments of conflict with wildlife to a consideration of more-than-human place making, resituating urban animals as neighbors rather than invaders. This analysis contributes to emergent conversations in more-than-human and urban geographies aimed at making visible other-than-human spaces, practices, and experiences, a project central to recuperating the urban as an existing and potential site of multispecies flourishing.
14-6 CRIME/DELINQUENCY
38-8546
criminalization. illegal logging. political forests. Romania. Violence.
In this article we explore the twisted consequences of the worldwide turn toward prohibitive policies and criminalization in conservation. We argue that tackling environmental challenges with legal repertoires that are coercive and punitive in nature increases criminalization and produces insidious and overt forms of violence. Tough-on-crime measures aimed at curbing illegal logging advance social vulnerabilities, further marginalizing already disenfranchised rural populations. Also, such measures trigger the formation of a culture of patronage, secrecy, fear, and anger, which facilitates the rise of forest violence. Transformations of forest use under increasingly harsh regimes of conservation have been documented worldwide, but these processes in Eastern Europe have received far less scholarly attention. Here we explore forest criminalization in Romania after it became a member state of the European Union, looking at different groups of alleged wrongdoers: petty community users, local forestry businessmen, and forestry officers. Drawing on interviews with forestry and conservation actors, media analysis, and ethnographic research of communities for which illegal logging was an everyday reality, we show how criminalization escalated into insidious forms of violence and the deepening of rural vulnerabilities.
38-8547
asylum geographies. Indigenous medicine. Legal geography. psychospiritual geographies. settler colonialism.
This article examines the puissance of psychospiritual geographies to Witsuwit’en–settler relations during the 1920s and 1930s in British Columbia, Canada. Specifically, we track the ontological politics of the psychospiritual that inhere to relationships between Indigenous healing traditions and a complex array of colonial institutions, including police detachments, courts, churches, residential schools, and asylums. Our entry point is the 1931 witchcraft trial of two Indigenous healers who police apprehended treating a person with cin sickness, a form of animal-spirit dream possession. The article highlights three central elements of the contested nature of psychospiritual care. First, it demonstrates the role that policing witchcraft played within the expansion of settler surveillance and control over Indigenous life. Second, we critically unpack court transcripts from the witchcraft trial, exploring how the Indigenous healers explained the treatment of dream sickness on the stand, as well as how courtroom mistranslations facilitated their criminalization. Third, we flip our gaze and interrogate the substance of colonial care, particularly focusing on the role of churches, residential schools, and asylums in causing psychospiritual harm to their Witsuwit’en wards. Through the article, we reveal the colonial deception that produces the illusion of benevolent settler institutions caring for Indigenous well-being while they actively disrupt the psychospiritual connections that define wellness within Witsuwit’en ontologies. To decolonize this foul settler magic, we argue that we must disrupt the universality of colonial ontologies, expose the violence inherent to settler regimes of care, and recognize the vitality of Indigenous psychospiritual relations to the more-than-human world.
38-8548
census tract level. multiscale. perceived safety. street crime. street view image.
Perceived safety of the built environment—a cognitive assessment different from emotional fear of crime—might affect the number of potential crime victims in an area and thus affect crime opportunities. The perceived safety derived from street view imagery has propelled scholars to examine its relationship with crime. The literature, however, has not addressed the related geographic scale variability issue; that is, the choice of the geographic analytical units might affect the relationship between area-based perceived safety and crime. This study explores how the relationships between street-view-derived perceived safety and both street thefts and street robberies vary by different spatial scales in Cincinnati. Results of negative binomial models show that perceived safety is positively associated with street thefts and street robberies at both the street segment and census block levels, but is negatively associated with these crimes at the census block group level. The relationship is not statistically significant at the census tract level. This variability is explained by the different freedom of avoidance behaviors in response to perceived safety, which change by geographic scale. The research further evaluates the within variance and between variance of perceived safety at different scales. Compared to between variance, within variance is smaller at both the street segment and block levels, but larger at both the block group and tract levels. This variability can be a source of model instability across multiple geographical scales. In short, the multiscale assessment shows that larger spatial units like the census tract are unsuitable for perceived safety–crime analysis.
14-7 HEALTH/EDUCATION/SOCIAL SERVICES
38-8549
activity space. human mobility. interdestination and intradestination scale. mobile phone data. tourism geography.
Destination, as a key concept in tourism geography, has largely determined the scale at which tourist activity space was modeled and studied. Existing studies usually focused on investigating tourists’ activities and movements either at the intradestination (e.g., within a city) or interdestination scale. Although useful in numerous research contexts, these models based on fixed spatial scales are incapable of portraying the complex spatial structure of tourist activity spaces, which sometimes exhibit hierarchical structures, and could span across different spatial scales. In this study, we propose a new representation of tourist activity space to bridge these gaps. The representation takes tourists’ accommodation locations as key reference points. At the macroscale, the sequence of accommodation locations forms the backbone of tourist activity space, denoted as itinerary type. At the microscale, we introduce the concept of territory to describe how individuals organize activities around these overnight “base camps” (i.e., accommodation locations). We apply this representation over a large-scale mobile phone data set of international travelers visiting South Korea to demonstrate its capability. Results show that four generic itinerary types capture the activity space structure of 89 percent of the tourists. The interrelationships of territories and their topological structures further categorize activity spaces into subtypes, leading to a new method of tourist classification based on their spatiotemporal activity patterns. We believe the proposed representation could enrich new perspectives and debates on how tourist activities can be studied. The representation can also be extended as a generic framework to delineate complex forms of human activity space.
38-8550
abortion. C22H38O5 . chemical geography. Latin America. pharmaceuticals. reproductive justice.
C22H38O5 is a chemical that travels. Better known as misoprostol, it was designed as a stomach ulcer drug but is now used around the world as an abortion pill due to the self-experimentation of those in Latin American communities who were seeking ways to end unwanted pregnancies. We develop a chemical geography approach to misoprostol that allows us to scale inward to understand the chemical properties of this medication and also to scale out to understand how medicinal effects are interwoven with and determined by global politics. Misoprostol as a chemical alone does not guarantee a successful abortion and instead “scaffolding” in the form of mobility and information is required to transform misoprostol from a chemical to a safe and effective technology of abortion. First, we examine how misoprostol is moved by feminist networks in Mexico and Peru. Second, we argue that to be useful it is not enough just to access the pills, as information on how to use them is required. These themes culminate in our contribution of pharmacokinetical geographies, the microgeography of the placement of pharmaceuticals in and on a body and its ramifications. The chemical geographies of misoprostol tell a story of power, bodily autonomy, and resistance.
38-8551
advocacy. Epidemiology. global health. Myth. noncommunicable disease. Public health.
Abdel Omran’s epidemiological transition theory has become a convenient heuristic device for explaining shifts in the global distribution of disease. In turn, the temporal and geographic transition from “pandemics of infection” to “degenerative and man-made diseases” (Omran Citation1971, 161) as countries develop has become part of the mythology of global health. Such myths are powerful not because they are necessarily clearly true or false, but rather for what they naturalize or oversimplify (Essebro 2018). Drawing on the example of the work undertaken over the past three decades to ensure the prioritization of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) as a problem of and for development within global health agendas, I draw on documentary and interview data to examine the origins and residual power of myths. Within this field, geographic myths (see Blaut Citation2006) about the social, economic, and spatial distribution of morbidity and mortality are a pervasive and persistent challenge for advocates trying to emphasize the threat of NCDs to the Global South. In examining the myth work undertaken by advocates, this article offers novel geographic perspectives to the critical global health field, while also arguing for the centrality of global health to geography as a discipline.
38-8552
Agamben. art extraordinary. bare life. lunatic asylums. mental health geographies. the camp.
The subdisciplinary field of mental health geography has arguably departed from its initial emphasis on mental ill health, and a case is made for continuing to take seriously the lifeworlds of people with severe and enduring mental health conditions, particularly if resident in psychiatric inpatient facilities. Attempting to (re)humanize inquiries in this field, emphasis is lent to the task of repeopling mental health geographies and, more broadly, to conjoining criticality in the vein of Agamben with a gentle humanism open to both “bareness” and “life.” Agamben’s claims about “bare life” and “the camp” are interfaced with inquiries into “the asylum,” and a triangular encounter between Holocaust authors Levi, Bettelheim, and Barton is staged—set in the horizon of Agamben’s ([1999] 2002) Remnants of Auschwitz—to craft a new sensibility for researching mental ill-health geographies. The authors then explore an act of “salvage” whereby the artworks of long-forgotten asylum dwellers are recovered, not to disclose hidden truths of “madness,” but rather to acknowledge those who drew, painted, wove, or sculpted as part of living with mental ill health. The overall ambition is to attune to the situation of—and to possibilities for “witnessing” in the relative absence of words—those who are barely there at the margins of the camp-asylum.
38-8553
Environmental justice. fugitive dust. Urban development. vacant property. Waste.
As Philadelphia’s postindustrial River Wards landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from construction projects settles on surrounding parks, gardens, and homes, and in the lungs of residents. Concerned about the reemergence of the area’s toxic history—especially the material legacies of lead refineries—and its impacts on their children’s health, local parents are organizing to understand and address the risks associated with the circulation of this “fugitive dust.” In this article, I examine latent and emergent risks of urban redevelopment by tracing the indeterminate, intimate trajectories of toxic dust as it traverses the spatial and temporal boundaries of property and proprietary subjects. In doing so, I consider the ways it disrupts racialized notions of improvement and refigures questions of socioenvironmental justice. Finally, in considering the possibilities for more just urban futures informed by present pasts, I attend to the fugitivity of dust: how its indeterminacy not only unsettles, but potentially escapes, the improvement–waste dichotomy in urban development praxis.
38-8554
Commercial real estate. COVID-19 pandemic. platform technologies. platform urbanism. San Francisco Bay Area.
Between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. technology industry increasingly shifted toward cities. Local governments pursuing innovation-led growth encouraged this shift, as exemplified by San Francisco, the spatial and symbolic urban home of the global technology industry. The commercial real estate market is central to understanding the city’s growth as a tech cluster between 2008 and 2020. Platform technology firms substantially contributed to employment growth and demand for office real estate in San Francisco during this period of rapid tech industry expansion. The city also exemplifies how the pandemic-led transition to remote work has profoundly changed the relationship between platform firms and urban space. In this article, we use interviews and secondary sources to study tech-led office leasing and development activity in San Francisco. We identify neighborhood-level trajectories of path dependence, industrial conversion, failed revitalization, and frontier-making during the period of growth leading up to 2020. Digital platform companies exert significant economic and political influence over cities, but their control over urban space is also constrained by the historical, material, and economic realities of commercial real estate.
38-8555
COVID-19 pandemic. GIS. health disparities. social determinants of health. Spatial analysis.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not only a medical disease outbreak but also a social inequality and health disparity problem. This study analyzed dynamic temporal and spatial associations between confirmed COVID-19 cases and socioeconomic status (SES) variables at the neighborhood level with three case studies to (1) analyze five temporal stages in the County of San Diego, California; (2) compare six U.S. metropolitan areas; and (3) compare SES associations across two spatial scales (counties and zip code units). We identified eleven SES variables as potential contributors to the social determinants of health that influence COVID-19 outbreaks and showed how their correlation coefficients vary over five phases. We found that changes in COVID-19 hot spots and clusters are minimal across the five stages. The consistent spatial patterns through the five outbreak periods imply that the place effects associated with fundamental health disparity factors are persistent and not easily changed. The impact of COVID-19 on SES varies in different local contexts. We also found that Hispanic populations, uninsured groups, Spanish-speaking families, those with less than a ninth-grade education level, and high household densities strongly correlated with COVID-19 cases in all six metropolitan areas. We did not find high scale dependency in SES association patterns between county and zip code spatial units, but analysis at a finer level can provide more association patterns.
38-8556
conjunctural mapping. People’s Park. Public space. Scales. Universities.
Following calls to spatialize conjunctures, this article proposes and practices conjunctural mapping through a case study of the ongoing struggle at People’s Park in Berkeley, California. Although the method of conjunctural analysis enables and requires an investigation into the multiple forces at work in the production of hegemony, such analyses tend to focus on cultural, economic, political, and social (or horizontal) dimensions of winning or contesting consent, without necessarily locating the formations of these expressions at different (vertical) scales. What is the role of the geographical in producing and countering hegemony, and how do we consider questions of scale in a conjunctural analysis? We offer an example through a conjunctural mapping of People’s Park, where the University of California, Berkeley, and park defenders address pressures and seize opportunities at the scales of the subject, city, and state to respectively redevelop or protect the park. Mapping their multiple geographies reveals how the neoliberal crisis (in higher education, affordable housing, and public space) takes place and requires work at each scale in the struggle for hegemonic settlement. Spiraling outward and upward, cases like People’s Park show that conjunctures are best analyzed through consideration of local complexities and scale articulations.
38-8557
COVID-19 pandemic. human mobility. machine learning. place–time-specific effective reproduction number Rst. spatial heterogeneity. spatiotemporal changes.
The transmission rate of COVID-19 varies by location and time. A proper measure of the transmissibility of an infectious disease should be place- and time-specific, which is currently unavailable. This research aims to better understand the spatiotemporally changing transmissibility of COVID-19. It contributes to COVID-19 research in three ways. First, it presents a generally applicable modeling framework to estimate the transmissibility of COVID-19 in a specific place and time based on daily reported case data, called space-time effective reproduction number, denoted as Rst.Then, the developed model is used to create a spatiotemporal data set of Rst values at the county level in the United States. Second, it investigates relationships between Rst and dynamically changing context factors with multiple machine learning and spatial modeling techniques. The research examines the relationships from a cross-sectional perspective and a longitudinal perspective separately. The longitudinal view allows us to understand how local human dynamics and policy factors influence changes in Rst over time in the place, whereas the cross-sectional view sheds light on the demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors behind spatial variations of Rst at a specific time slice. Some general trends of the relationships are found, but the level of impact by each context factor varies geographically. Third, the best performing local longitudinal models have promising potential to simulate or forecast future transmissibility. The random forest and the exponential regression models based on time-series data gave the best performances. These models were further evaluated against ground truth data of county-level reported cases. Their good prediction accuracies in the case study prove that these machine learning models are promising in their ability to predict transmissibility in hypothetical or foreseeable scenarios.
38-8558
COVID-19 pandemic. mobilities. multidimensional clustering. pattern detection. spatial time series data. whole time sequence mixture.
The COVID-19 pandemic exerted devastating effects on the global economy, public health, and urban life. The geographical consequences lie in spatial time series dimensions, but the chaotic characteristics hinder intuitive understanding. Aiming to discover the variance of urban mobility in the pandemic context, this article presents a hybrid clustering technique called whole time sequence mixture (WTSM). The combination of whole time and subsequence techniques ensures robustness to data volume, dimensionality, sampling, distortion tasks, and a prior constraint. For yellow taxi trips in New York City, the case study spanned the pre-, mid-, and postpandemic periods and compared the performance of the established methods (symbolic aggregate approximation and dynamic time warping) and WTSM techniques. Findings revealed COVID-19 trends and social restriction-induced mobility variations and determined that vaccine supply did not lead to immediate mobility restoration. Meanwhile, concepts of validation indexes and computational complexity corroborate the superiority of WTSM. The transient cluster arising from temporal dissimilarity is a unique finding of WTSM, which led to high cluster cohesion and separation. WTSM can obtain new knowledge and rationale for urgent government intervention and epidemic management, not sacrificing computational efficiency and clustering quality. With the improved storage capability and desire for multidimensional pattern extraction, the increased accessibility to the chaotic time series data sets could promote further studies and help administrative schemes.
38-8559
balanced governance. Bayesian spatial models. COVID-19 pandemic. nonpharmaceutical interventions. Policy evaluation.
Scientific evidence suggests that nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) effectively curb the spread of COVID-19 before a pharmaceutical solution. Implementing these interventions also significantly affects regular socioeconomic activities and practices of social, racial, and political justice. Local governments often face conflicting goals during policymaking. Striking a balance among competing goals during a global pandemic is a fine science of governance. How well state governments consume the scientific evidence and maintain such a balance remains less understood. This study employs a set of Bayesian hierarchical models to evaluate how state governments in the United States use scientific evidence to balance the fighting against the spread of COVID-19 disease and socioeconomic, racial, social justice, and other demands. We modeled the relationships between five NPI strategies and COVID-19 caseload information and used the modeled result to perform a balanced governance evaluation. The results suggest that governmental attitude and guidance effectively guide the public to fight back against a global pandemic. The more detailed spatiotemporally varying coefficient process model produces 612,000 spatiotemporally varying coefficients, suggesting all measures sometimes work somewhere. Summarized results indicate that states emphasizing NPIs fared well in curbing the spread of COVID-19. With over 1 million deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States, we feel the balance scale likely needs to tip toward preserving human lives. Our evaluation of governance policies is hence based on such an argument. This study aims to provide decision support for policymaking during a national emergency.
14-8 PLANNING AND GENDER/RACE/ETHNICITY
38-8560
American South. digital geographies. Gentrification. Race. whiteness.
Pairing data-driven and participatory processes is an alluring approach for contentious urban issues. However, within these processes, the ongoing role of whiteness – an unnamed norm that privileges White people – is understudied and undertheorized. I examine how data and participation were positioned within conversations of gentrification in Lexington, KY. Beyond considering who participates, I analyse how the expectations and burdens of engagement associated with these processes were racialized. I argue that surfacing and problematizing racialized expectations of engagement disrupts how whiteness produces a strategic recognizing and disavowing – an unseeing – of racial oppression and thus diagnoses the whiteness of urban planning.
38-8561
Black ecologies. Black geographies. critical physical geography. Environmental justice. slavery.
Building on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Black studies scholars have long theorized and analyzed what it means to exist in the afterlife of slavery, which refers to the precarity and devaluation of Black life since chattel slavery. This article draws the natural environment into this discourse to conceptualize the biophysical afterlife of slavery. The biophysical afterlife of slavery describes how the precarity and devaluation of Black life has affected the natural environments in which these lives exist. Slavery left lingering impacts on soil, water, and vegetation regimes as it maneuvered and settled across the earth, but importantly, its ideological and sociopolitical legacies continue to impact Black ecologies today. I argue that to methodologically attend to the biophysical afterlife of slavery there must be a meaningful integration of critical physical geography and Black geographies. As an example of this integration, I suggest that there is a myriad of methods used to reconstruct environmental histories, such as dendrochronology that, when brought together with a Black geographies lens, create mechanisms to analyze the past, present, and future of the biophysical afterlife of slavery.
38-8562
affect. Arts. Memorials. memory. National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Race.
This article concerns material art, the atmospheres they create, and the affects they engender in their audiences. It is about how the works of art at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) in Montgomery, Alabama, work to create an atmosphere that enrolls its visitors as empathetic witnesses to the lynchings documented throughout the memorial. The NMPJ is an affecting landscape where visitors learn of the ugly extralegal history of lethal violence against African Americans in the United States. Through a textual analysis of Web-posted Google reviews of the NMPJ, the affecting work that art performs on its viewers is revealed. The NMPJ compels its visitors to both feel and think about a brutal U.S. past and in so doing, it presences the absented victims of lynchings. The NMPJ is not only a place of remembering, but it is a place of re-membering—a reattaching of the lost dead into the narrative body of the U.S. story.
38-8563
Black feminism. Environmental justice. place-making. rental housing. survivability.
Environmental injustices have shaped how urban communities of color access, interact with, and are affected by indoor and outdoor environments in their daily lives. This includes access to and control of outdoor spaces, such as gardens, vacant neighborhood lots, and green spaces for growing food and plants and for coming together. For tenants in rented homes, it too often includes exposure to harmful indoor environments, such as toxic molds, rodent infestations, lead paint, broken heaters, and other unsafe and uncomfortable living conditions. Although geographers of race, nature, and environment have attended to rental housing through studies of green gentrification and racialized displacement, they have paid less attention to homes themselves and the survivability of Black women through everyday practices of resistance and placemaking. This community coauthored article focuses on Dubuque, Iowa—a predominately White, small Midwestern U.S. city with a growing Black population—and examines the cooperative practices of Black women tenants and community activists in pressing the municipal government to hold landlords responsible for living conditions in private rental homes. Together, they are working through institutional policy and procedural hurdles to confront anti-Blackness, cocreate livable urban environments, and “stay put” in the midst of gentrifying neighborhood revitalization plans.
38-8564
anti-Blackness. domestic service. Land. patriarchy. political ecology. Race.
Foreign land control and Afro-Panamanian women domestics are mutually constituted and embedded in tourism development in Panama. In this article, I center the racial and patriarchal logics of dispossession informing land control, a process that connects twenty-first-century residential tourism development to twentieth-century U.S. imperial formations in the making of the Panama Canal. My approach blends ethnographic research with historical data collection, newspapers, and development-related policy documents drawn across a variety of research sites in Panama, Spain, and North America. To begin, I briefly trace the contemporary context of tourism-induced land dispossession and the growing tenure insecurities for Afro-Panamanian communities living on the shores of the Panamanian Caribbean. Here I show how residential tourism development reproduces settler colonial landscapes. Further, I place in conversation the concepts of postcolonial intersectionality and cuerpo-territorio (Cabnal Citation2015) to illustrate how land control and domestic service are interconnected, punctuating how land is not the only site of colonial governance. I then historicize tourism in Panama through tracing the discursive narratives of imperial formations in the early period of U.S. empire and the construction of the Panama Canal. I trace elite travel narratives, newspapers, and memoirs to link the racialized labor regimes of the Canal to the domestic spaces of the Canal Zone. Finally, I argue that foreign land acquisitions and domestic service are inextricably entangled in tourism development across time and space in Panama.
38-8565
antiracist geographies. Chicago. conjunctural theory. Human geography. racial formation theory. racism and capitalism.
Harold Maurice Baron (1930–2017) was a researcher and organizer of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965–1967) who made important contributions to racial formation theory and the broader theorization of the relationship between racism and capitalism. Baron produced notable contributions to the study of racism throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, such as his essays “The Demand for Black Labor,” “Racial Domination in Advanced Capitalism,” and “Racism Transformed: The Implications of the 1960s.” I argue that Baron can be productively read as a radical geographer, and in turn, that his corpus offers important theoretical reflections for the task of building antiracist geographies. Baron produced a “geopolitical” interpretation of racism in the United States, highlighting how racist practices were used as problem-solving measures by the hegemonic institutions of postwar capitalism, most notably the capitalist state (at multiple scales), capitalist production, and the imperative to manage the unemployed and racialized poor (particularly via civil society institutions). In this article, I outline Baron’s research project as it evolved throughout his life, and offer a geographical interpretation of his work, highlighting his relevance to contemporary theoretical projects within human geography.
38-8566
anticolonial feminism. colonization. heteropatriarchy. Racism. relationality. storytelling.
According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural understandings of our relations with earth? We closely read three anticolonial (feminist) scholars whose theories illuminate the relationship of race, gender, and nature: Wynter’s genealogy of humans as storytellers; Lorena Cabnal’s elaboration of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and ancestral patriarchy; and Mishuana Goeman’s conceptualization of the body as a meeting place. Anticolonial feminist storytelling alters the spatiotemporal scales through which planetary crises are understood by centering the relationship between body and land. We elaborate how the White, cis male, bourgeois and propertied figure of the human reproduces a story that normalizes the racialization of people and ecologies, gendered domination, and extractivism. Revealing this dominant story to be a fiction of modernity, these scholars open a space of possibility, to tell stories otherwise that reimagine what it means to be human on earth. Storytelling as anticolonial praxis troubles the fixity of racial-colonial violence and reconceives the human, not as a liberal subject or fixed object within colonial capitalism, but as a node within a relational network of human and nonhuman kin.
38-8567
Black ecologies. moral geographies. New Deal. racial capitalism. swamplands.
This article introduces swampification, a social and methodological process whereby governments, corporations, and the press socially (re)invented swamplands as spaces of death, disease, and “uninhabitability” to justify their destruction. Using the case of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in New Deal South Carolina, this article demonstrates how White institutions sought to eradicate Black autonomous spaces and ecological connections. I build on Black ecologies, a subfield that aims to illuminate conditions and relations Black people have with/in ecological and social worlds that comprise struggles for existence and legacies of world building. I propose coupling Black ecologies with moral geographies to bring attention to the sociospatial imaginaries placed on Black people that forced them to the ecological margins, then later extracted them from those very spaces when the landscapes stood in the way of White progress. Swampification did not merely stagnate Black terraqueous landscapes but further perpetuated racial stereotypes of Blackness as out-of-place and pestilent, and situated the presence of non-White others as antithetical to U.S. progress.
15. Development Planning
15-1 COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT
38-8568
embodied identities. everyday religion. lived Islam. Muslim geographies. Muslim youth.
This article explores lived Islam in the context of two young American Muslim women’s everyday lives. Although much of the scholarship on Muslim geographies is grounded in people’s everyday lives, the focus has been to situate and examine the specific meanings and expressions of “Muslim” identities. Whereas scholars intentionally have been writing against anti-Muslim racism and with the commendable aim of gaining extensive knowledge, our focus on “Muslim” has at times been at the expense of other salient identities, activities, and interests of interlocutors. Drawing on the broader scholarship on lived religion, this article offers geographers an approach to lived Islam influenced by feminist geographical and phenomenological frameworks. Through ethnographic methods, lived Islam offers a detailed picture of subjective everyday life, with a focus on embodied and emotionally charged memories, intersecting identities, and practices. Such a feminist approach to the lived enactment of religious faith rejects inherent identity categories as well as binaries such as religious–secular. Lived Islam contributes importantly to Muslim geographies and feminist geographies of religion by elaborating on the complexities of Muslim lives and identities, how being Muslim is integral to different kinds of nonreligious identities and practices in different secular and nonreligious spaces within specific social and political contexts.
38-8569
anti-Blackness. Displacement. New urbanism. Urban renewal. whiteness.
Sometimes heralded as the first ever new urbanist development, Starkville, Mississippi’s Cotton District neighborhood stands out as a relatively dense, walkable, and mixed-use neighborhood in the otherwise car-centric landscapes of the rural south. Together with the neighborhood’s colorful buildings reminiscent of the grand homes of the antebellum South, these elements obscure the fact that the neighborhood as it exists today is the result of a federally funded urban renewal project that razed much of the adjacent Black neighborhood of Needmore and opened up the present-day Cotton District as a space for new investment. In excavating the details of these different elements of the Cotton District’s history, our central conceit is that the Cotton District represents what we call a “nostalgic neo-plantationist pastiche” produced through the material and symbolic displacement of Blackness and its replacement with both material and symbolic whiteness. By conceptualizing this landscape as constituted fundamentally by white nostalgia for a mythical, bygone era of plantation capitalism, and instantiated through a bricolage of architectural and design styles, we seek to draw attention to the precise ways that this landscape actively (re)constructs the past, rather than simply representing it. At the same time, the case of the Cotton District offers an opportunity to reconsider received wisdom in urban design and planning concerning the historic and contemporary linkages between urban renewal and new urbanism, and racial inequality and urban planning more generally.
15-2 SMALL TOWN/RURAL DEVELOPMENT
38-8570
abolition ecologies. agriculture. Black geographies. Clyde Woods. Food. Land.
We ground this article in the uneven geographies of the Mississippi Delta, a region constructed at the intersection of agro-environmental racism and plantation violence, nutrient-rich soil, and dynamic Black geographies. The processes of containment, dispossession, and commodification of life and land were essential to the construction of the region following a particular agricultural and racial development trajectory dominated by what Clyde Woods calls the Plantation Bloc. And yet, strategies and struggles to make life against and outside of these dynamics also took hold of the region. We reconceptualize the Mississippi Black Freedom Movement and the overlapping struggles for land, housing, healthcare, and new forms of work as movements against agro-environmental racism and the making of a place-based environmental justice rooted in Black ecologies. Drawing on Black and abolition ecologies we trace connections across rural Black organizing in cooperative, farm, and catfish processing communities in the Mississippi Delta. By organizing along modes of collective flourishing and against threats to daily life, these movements provide an alternative trajectory to agro-environmental racism and sought to create a place of stewardship and co-operation.
38-8571
Colorado River. crop pattern. groundwater overdraft. Mexicali Valley. transboundary aquifer. water balance.
The Colorado River delta is a sedimentary alluvial formation that embodies the Lower Colorado River transboundary aquifer. The Mexicali Valley overlies the Mexican part of the aquifer, and the Imperial Valley the aquifer’s portion north of the Mexico–U.S. border. Mexico receives an annual water allocation from the Colorado River stipulated by an international treaty between Mexico and the United States. The Colorado River water allocation to Mexico is shared by farmers in the Mexicali Valley and by several border cities, rural communities, and industries in the northern region of the State of Baja California. Farmers withdraw groundwater from the Mexicali Valley’s aquifer to make up for insufficient Colorado River water to grow their crops. Groundwater withdrawal has created overdraft of the Mexicali Valley aquifer with associated adverse impacts: sea water intrusion, declining groundwater levels, upwelling of brackish groundwater, land subsidence, degradation of groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and emigration of displaced farmers. This article reviews the natural and human histories in the Colorado River basin and the Mexicali Valley, and presents a methodology applying remote sensing, geographic information analysis, and hydrologic analysis to calculate the annual water deficit in the Mexicali Valley. Finally, this work evaluates the valley’s annual water deficit in reference to current agricultural and socioeconomic trends observed in the study region. Aquifer and related environmental degradation have adversely affected small-scale farming and exacerbated demographic instability.
15-3 REGIONAL PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
38-8572
India. Indian railways. Infrastructure. labor. mobilities. Swachh Bharat (Clean India). waiting.
Waiting is spatial, gendered, and hidden. Drawing on ethnographic field work with cleaners in railway facilities of Hyderabad, India, and building on infrastructure and mobilities studies, I theorize the space-time of waiting. I propose waiting as a multivalent lens through which to view power, space, and labor relations. Second, I argue that waiting is a method offering possibilities for understanding the Sisyphean task of cleaning and uneven, precarious, and diverse urban worlds. Waiting is integral to maintenance work, and pivotal to the production of “clean” infrastructures, yet it remains invisible. Third, I posit waiting as praxis: a mode of field work grappling with place-based realities. Waiting is learning the station. My article considers the social and economic (im)mobilities that underpin the waiting of cleaning workers. I further posit queues as microinfrastructures of waiting. Finally, I argue that waiting, when employed as a method, and as praxis, reveals the uneven urban worlds, relational spaces, and the everydayness of capitalism.
38-8573
Conservation. Neoliberalism. Patagonia. spectacle 2.0. spectacle of nature.
In this article, we bring together understandings of the spectacle of nature and spectacle 2.0 to show how people are invited to participate in the spectacular production of nature. Recent work has expanded on the Debordian notion of spectacle, interrogating the ways people do not just consume images, but help to produce and enact spectacle: spectacle 2.0. Building on this, we argue that in conservation, consumers increasingly interact with the spectacle through digital and real-life means, thereby reinforcing and reproducing the nature that is being transformed. We term this process the spectacle of nature 2.0. We present the case of Valle Chacabuco in southern Chile, which has been transformed into Patagonia National Park. This process has been welcomed by the international conservation community, but has incited tension and conflict with local residents who have their own very different sense of Valle Chacabuco. Through the production of spectacle, park discourses highlight the heroic role of Northern conservationists, obscuring the underlying capitalist logics of the project and the social tensions it has created. We argue that it was possible to unmake/remake Valle Chacabuco from once a place of livelihoods, ranching, and production to a place of unspoiled nature through the recruitment of digital and material interaction. In the process, environmental politics and activism are channeled back into the dominant underlying capitalist ideology. Patagonia National Park is now a place that the park promoters claim belongs to the world, its nature and culture to be consumed and reproduced by environmentalists and tourists.
38-8574
defensive incorporation. environmental injustice. Morningside . North Carolina. racial residential segregation. water insecurity.
In the late 1990s, the predominantly white community of Morningside, North Carolina, prevented annexation into the larger majority-minority city of Greensboro, citing their desire to “preserve their way of life.” This case demonstrates how a white, affluent town incorporated, resisting annexation, and with it, centralized water service connections. More than twenty years later, many residents in Morningside continue to reject centralized water and sewerage, fearing it will facilitate in-migration and erode the town’s “community character.” These decades-long dynamics maintain the high degree of racial residential segregation between Morningside and neighboring Greensboro. Morningside stands in stark contrast to many Black communities in North Carolina, which are underbounded and excluded from municipal water and sanitation. This case contributes to environmental injustice and water security scholarship in three ways. First, we enrich the meaning ascribed to water infrastructure and the purposes that it serves—as a connection (an improvement) and as an intrusion. Second, by situating these current contests within a larger historical context, we highlight the social constructedness of water. In this dialectical relationship, water is both the outward mechanism to marginalize, hiding the actors behind the process, and the object of corruption for people who are marginalized. Third, we demonstrate how water infrastructure advances exclusionary futures that rely on erasure and discursive coding. Overall, we caution how the depoliticization of centralized water infrastructure can enable the persistence of racial residential segregation in the United States.
38-8575
Bayesian methods. historical redlining. Housing discrimination. mortgage finance.
This article analyzes the regional variation in outcomes of a seemingly standardized federal neighborhood valuation principle used in home mortgage insurance grading. The objective is to highlight the contingent discriminatory and economic conditions that mediated heterogeneous housing outcomes across different parts of the United States. How did city and regional economic and demographic growth patterns vary before and during the mortgage insurance program implemented through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)? How might this have shaped loan guarantee patterns? How does preexisting racial housing discrimination relate to outcomes? Adopting an orientation that centers on Whiteness and the benefits of mortgage finance for certain groups and neighborhoods, this analysis uses a Bayesian hierarchical framework to investigate the degree of the FHA’s influence between 1940 and 1970, here proxied by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, on A or B (“AB”) graded neighborhoods versus C graded neighborhoods in different cities. This article studies how home values and homeownership change over time and whether there are regional variations in the influence of these grades. It also studies what longitudinal socioeconomic patterns might explain the persistence or decline of the AB effect over time. Findings show cities in the West Coast, Southwest, and northern central United States that saw the most housing construction also had the highest proportions of FHA loans to overall dwelling units. There is also a distinctive consistency and persistence of benefit on home value and homeownership to AB graded neighborhoods in these cities, possibly owing to regional shifts in the industrial landscape.
38-8576
biopolitics. care ethics. emotional labor. scholars. social welfare institutions.
Feminist scholars have highlighted the potential of care ethics to challenge the neoliberal social paradigm by underscoring the power of emotion and affect in shaping intersubjectivity. In a similar vein, Hardt and Negri (Citation2001, Citation2005) stressed the power of affect to challenge capitalism. Other scholars, however, have challenged these positive aspects of emotion in care practices, citing the potential harm caused when affective ties to care recipients or the obligation to provide emotional care exploits workers. This article discusses the paradox of care that simultaneously enables and hurts, nurtures and harms. Based on ethnographic field work in five Chinese state-owned social welfare institutions (SWIs) caring for orphans, this article argues that the emotional labor in SWIs on the one hand produces intersubjectivity among caregivers and children in their care, and on the other hand it harms caregivers emotionally, leading them to use strategies such as drawing emotional boundaries with the orphans to protect themselves from the pain of losing “their” children when they are adopted. This article contributes to the geography of care literature by challenging the fantasy and romanticization of affect in care settings and stressing the paradox of care and affect.
16. International Planning
16-1 DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
38-8577
Climate change. nature. Resilience. urban. Values.
Transcending initial efforts to make cities “climate smart” by focusing on the potential of new technologies and infrastructural interventions, various actors are increasingly interested in deploying nature to help achieve urban resilience. In this context, rather than taking resilience as a given property of particular systems or entities, it is important to examine why, how, with what implications, and for whom resilience is being enacted. We examine how and why nature-based solutions are being mobilized as a means for governing the resilience of cities and what this means for the ways in which urban resilience is imagined and enacted by different actors. Recognizing that behind different approaches to resilience are diverse ways of valuing nature, we identify four value positions through which nature comes to be understood, given meaning, form, and purpose. Drawing on systematic document analysis and sixty-six interviews from Cape Town, Mexico City, and Melbourne, we discuss how these four value positions of nature are manifested in nature-based interventions for resilience, as well as the implications both for the politics of resilience interventions and the opportunities for enabling social benefit through nature-based solutions. We find that the integration of intrinsic values for nature opens opportunities for nature-based solutions to enable social benefits through an increased focus on the means through which they are implemented. We conclude that urban-nature-as-resilience interventions serve to embed values and the socionatures they produce within the city, creating fundamentally different consequences for the forms and politics of nature-based interventions designed to realize urban resilience.
38-8578
bottom-up initiatives. city regionalism. coalitional developmentalism. coalitional politics. Pearl River Delta.
A conceptual framework of coalitional developmentalism is presented to advance understanding of how China’s city regions have developed from bottom-up initiatives. Coalitional developmentalism extends state developmentalism with an emphasis on coalitional politics through which local state agents spontaneously form strategic coalitions to pursue regional growth. The case of the Pearl River Delta shows that a defining goal of coalitional developmentalism is to bolster regional governance capacity to overcome territorial fragmentation induced by jurisdiction-based development. First, the flexible state regulation is fundamental to developing deliberate scale-building processes toward regional governance. Second, bottom-up initiatives for building city regions emerge through a decentralized institutional structure in which governments at various scales work in an integrated fashion—via the functional integration of cities in a local official system—and the strong governance capacity of advanced cities. Third, coalitional developmentalism creates a testbed for facilitating region-based territorial growth by the central government, following long-established planning centrality paradigms. Fourth, bottom-up innovative behaviors unfold through coalitional politics associated with the top-down state spatial interventions that are a distinctive characteristic of “state spatiality” in postreform China.
16-2 APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY
38-8579
agency. Artificial Intelligence. Arts. cocreativity. digital geographies. theoretical and empirical discussion.
This article applies theoretical and empirical discussions of emerging human and digital technology relations to our interest in collaborative artist–artificial intelligence (AI) artmaking processes. Thus far, the theoretical focus has largely been on mediating (code) and merged (cyborg) human–technology relations, with mutual (coagency) relations yet to be adequately explored. To address this, we nuance the theoretical discussion and extend the empirical research, analyzing the spatial cocreative artmaking process through video interviews with eighteen Finnish artists using AI. Drawing on the work of Barad, we regard humans and AI as fundamentally entwined, receiving their agencies through intra-action. Building on this, we demonstrate how the agencies of artists and AI emerge and mutually evolve across three stages of the creative process: (1) coding and data, (2) learning and training, and (3) curating the outcome. Thus, through our empirical research on how artist and AI create new material and meaningful artworlds, we are able to nuance understanding of coagency as a spatial process.
16-4 NATIONAL/REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT
38-8580
China. community gardens. flanking mechanism. interstitial space. radical spaces. regeneration. Urban governance.
In the literature, community gardens feature as contested spaces: They are radical spaces used by grassroots movements to claim the “right to the city,” organized garden projects attached to neoliberal strategies, or physical breeding grounds for neoliberal citizen-subjectivity. Long established in many Western contexts, community gardens were not evident in China until a group of scholar-activists in Shanghai initiated the practice in 2016. Drawing on two flagship community garden cases in that city, we investigate the emergence and development of community gardens and discuss the ways in which they instantiate neither a radical nor a neoliberal political vision. Our observations show that a nonprofit organization—rather than the local citizenry or municipal government—proactively advanced the production of community gardens and the discursive construction of community participation over time. The rationale underlying this practice arises from organizers’ framing of the community gardens as an “experiment of governance innovation” that dovetails with a broader reorientation of China’s urban renewal agenda from demolition and reconstruction toward a people-centered incremental urban regeneration characterized by mass mobilization and social participation. We argue, therefore, that the community garden phenomenon reifies an alternative subjectivity—one that emphasizes the increasing visibility of social organizations as a state “flanking mechanism” to achieve extraeconomic objectives in urban governance. We also advance a pluralist understanding of China’s urban governance beyond a growth-chasing logic to embrace the increasing complexity of the state ethos and societal instruments at play in and associated with this sphere.
38-8581
Cold War. Communist China. geographer. history of geography. Sovietization.
This article investigates the Sovietization of Chinese geographers during the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) using primary sources and published biographies to examine three career paths: red, expert, and red and expert. The red geographers, led by the veteran Communist Sun Jingzhi, who monopolized the field of economic geography, shifted the orientation of geography from the Western model to the model followed in the Soviet Union. The pre-Communist geographers, under the leadership of Harvard-trained Zhu Kezhen, controlled the field of physical geography, relying on their professional training and technical expertise. These two cliques competed for control of the Chinese Geographical Society, its journal, and the Institute of Geography, whereas the Liverpool-trained Hou Renzhi used both redness and expertise to gain prominence in the field of historical geography. This article contends that the reformation of geographers in Communist China continued beyond the political purge of 1949. The twists and turns in career paths derive from the contested nature of the discipline, the changing contours of the science, and connections with institutional structures, all of which illuminate the imbrication of political allegiance, professional expertise, and personal relationships as the geographical tradition persisted in new forms after reformation. In this sense, this article diversifies a history of geography that is too often centered on Anglo-American experiences, and it furthers our understanding of the professionalization of geography as one that has taken a nonlinear course.
16-6 TRANSNATIONAL PLANNING
38-8582
critical geography. internationalism. Latin American integration. new geography. Transnationalism.
Based on new archival documents and on original interviews, this article extends recent works exploring radical and critical geographies from linguistic areas other than the Anglo-American ones. It addresses the extraordinary story of the two international meetings for the “New Geography” that took place in Salto, Uruguay, in 1973 and in Neuquén, Argentina, in 1974, still ill-known due to the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, which forced many of their protagonists to exile or to professional reconversion. Analyzing surviving documents and reconstructing the trajectories of these gatherings’ protagonists allows the development of an original point for today’s critical and radical geographies. That is, the frameworks of national academies are insufficient to develop critical approaches that need first to be constructed through practices rather than mere theories, addressing societal problems in connection with activism. This business can be only accomplished though voluntarist, transnational and cosmopolitan scholars’ engagement.
38-8583
carceral circuitry. geographer. public information campaigns. state sovereignty. transnational enforcement.
Geographers have been central to identifying and exploring the shifting spatialities of border enforcement and how different enforcement strategies alter the geography of state sovereignty. Migration-related public information campaigns (PICs) are one strategy that has received increasing attention from geographers and social scientists more broadly in recent years. Although existing research examines the sites and spaces where PICs are distributed, as well as the affective content of their messaging, little research has examined the development of campaigns and the transnational connections that enable their deployment. This article draws on work in the fields of carceral circuitry and transnational enforcement networks to expand our understanding of affective governmentality as a transnational strategy of border governance. Based on data collected as part of a large-scale comparative study of the use of PICs by the U.S. and Australian governments, we argue that this form of affective governmentality relies on transnational circuits through which people, money, and knowledge move to enable the development and circulation of affective messaging. In doing so, we develop the concept of transnational affective circuitry to refer to the often contingent, temporary relations and connections that enable PICs to operate as a form of transnational affective governmentality aimed at hindering unauthorized migration. Our analysis illustrates the transnational connections that enable increasingly expansive and creative forms of border enforcement to emerge while also expanding the scope of examinations of affective governmentality to attend to the relations that undergird and enable this form of transnational governance.
METHODOLOGY/QUANTITATIVE/ECONOMIC/QUALITATIVE
20. Methodology
20-1 MATHEMATICAL MODELS
38-8584
flow area. geometric-hydraulic relationships. inverse model. Saint-Venant equations. segment-averaged outputs.
This article presents a novel method to identify geometric-hydraulic relationships–in terms of mathematical formulas—in the form of segment-averaged outputs and a function of depth in rivers. There are several methods for determining geometric-hydraulic relationships in rivers, including flow area, wetted perimeter, and the flow top width. Direct field surveying and using aerial and satellite sensor instruments are the most prevalent. The model presented here, however, is based on the inverse solution of the Saint-Venant equations without costly field-surveyed river geometry data. The relationships mentioned earlier can be easily used in various hydraulic models, such as flood routing, sediment transport, pollutant transport, and so on. Moreover, this method requires the lowest number of parameters as the input of the inverse model because by minimizing the corresponding objective function, the desired parameters are estimated in the whole studied segment. The proposed inverse model is validated using hypothetical and real test cases. In one of the test cases—as the most comprehensive and practical test case—the application of the presented inverse model was validated in a river network. The Manning roughness coefficient and geometric-hydraulic relationships for different segments were simultaneously estimated at an acceptable level of accuracy and computational costs in this river network. Ultimately, the real and identified geometric-hydraulic relationships are compared for each test case, and statistical indexes are demonstrated. Overall, the results and statistical indexes indicate that the model is more successful and also cheaper than costly conventional methods.
20-2 INFORMATION AND TECHNOLOGY
38-8585
automotive industry. feminist labor geography. gendered divisions of labor. labor agency. skills. technological change.
How are skills struggled over in occupations transforming through evolving technologies? This article contributes a feminist labor geography perspective amidst reinvigorated interest in skills. Within economic geography, human capital approaches view skills as resources measurable through quantitative proxies. Such analyses reveal place-based endowments and skills mismatches but, unable to capture lived experience or uneven power relations, overlook how skill facilitates agency for different workers. In contrast, we theorize skill as both processual—constantly unfolding and contested—and a mechanism unevenly empowering workers based on recognition (or lack thereof). Ethnographic research proceeded with workers employed by automotive shops, a context at the forefront of disruptive technologies. Two key roles underpin profitable operations. Technicians, overwhelmingly men, work individually from shop floors, diagnosing problems, repairing, and maintaining vehicles. Customer care staff, predominantly women, work in small teams from reception spaces, managing “car count” and mediating interactions between technicians and customers. In both roles, workers upskill to meet shifting service demands and retain brand-managed expertise. Yet, enduring and newly acquired skills are unevenly recognized and rewarded. Three factors fortified systemic barriers to progression: tasks extended and co-evolved unevenly with multi-skilled working bodies; gender-biased skills recognition favored technicians (skills with cars/deemed scarce) over customer service (skills of interactive translation/deemed replaceable); and workers positioned atop hierarchies refuted co-workers’ skills claims within workplaces. For geographers concerned with the quality and fairness of work amidst evolving technological change, we argue that skill unveils the socio-spatial foundations of agency: materializing unevenly and struggled over in everyday life.
20-4 RESEARCH METHODS
38-8586
nonmarket valuation. OK-First program. Oklahoma Mesonet. public safety officials. travel cost method. weather decision support.
The Oklahoma Mesonet’s Public Safety outreach program, OK-First, has provided weather education and data delivery to the public safety community for the past twenty-five years. By delivering high-quality weather data tools, regular classes, and continued follow-up support to its trained members, the OK-First program has empowered more than 1,800 public safety officials. Testimonials from OK-First users indicate that there is an immense value in providing nonscientific audiences with meteorological information and training. OK-First users have saved lives and property using the the program. There has been no quantitative analysis, however, that evaluates the value of the OK-First program. This study fills a gap in providing quantitative analysis for the economic value of the OK-First program. This research used a modified travel cost method to measure the value of information provided by the OK-First program to the users of the program. Results suggest that the average willingness to pay for OK-First is $1,122 per training. The OK-First program in Oklahoma is valued at an estimated $254,000, with a collective surplus of $80,000 per training for OK-First users. This conservative estimate suggests the importance of programs such as the OK-First training, especially for public safety officials in Oklahoma.
38-8587
activity space. degree distribution. epidemiological models. physical contact. social media. Twitter data.
Constructing a data-driven spatial contact network model is challenging in epidemiological research. In this study, we examine the applicability of geotagged Twitter data as an instrumental data source for tackling such a challenge. Geotagged Twitter data carrying geolocations of the account users have the strength for longitudinal data collection at a massive scale. Still, the unstructured nature of the data exerts significant methodological and computational difficulties. We focus on methodological solutions and develop a novelty approach that lets a spatial contact network emerge naturally from the massive amount of geospatial tweets. We show that such a data-driven network has reflected the assumptions made by network models regarding human behaviors and has the potential of being used for epidemiological research. To this end, we investigate the network properties and study the spread of pathogens on the proposed spatial contact network by using the homogeneous and heterogeneous susceptible–infectious–recovered (SIR) network models and the event-driven Gillespie’s algorithm. Our simulation results strongly suggest that it is feasible to explicitly construct data-driven spatial models using massive longitudinal Twitter data for public health research.
21. Population
21-2 POPULATION PLANNING
38-8588
epistemology. geographic research methods. open science. reproducibility. researcher survey.
The number of reproduction and replication studies undertaken across the sciences continues to rise, but such studies have not yet become commonplace in geography. Existing attempts to reproduce geographic research suggest that many studies cannot be fully reproduced, or are simply missing components needed to attempt a reproduction. Despite this suggestive evidence, a systematic assessment of geographers’ perceptions of reproducibility and use of reproducible research practices remains absent from the literature, as does an identification of the factors that keep geographers from conducting reproduction studies. We address each of these needs by surveying active geographic researchers selected using probability sampling techniques from a rigorously constructed sampling frame. We identify a clear division in perceptions of reproducibility among geographic subfields. We also find varying levels of familiarity with reproducible research practices and a perceived lack of incentives to attempt and publish reproduction studies. Despite many barriers to reproducibility and divisions between subfields, we also find common foundations for examining and expanding reproducibility in the field. These include interest in publishing transparent and reproducible methods, and in reproducing other researchers’ studies for a variety of motivations including learning, assessing the internal validity of a study, or extending prior work.
38-8589
Bayesian analysis. censored data. new HIV diagnosis. pre-exposure prophylaxis. spatiotemporal statistics.
In the South region of the United States, HIV is disproportionately high and levels of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use, which is highly effective in reducing the risk of acquiring HIV, are among the lowest across the country. Simultaneously examining the geographical distributions of both new HIV diagnoses and PrEP use as well as how they evolve over time at the county level is valuable for developing locally tailored intervention programs to target areas most in need of help. There is scant research on this topic using publicly accessible data sets, however, partly because of statistical challenges in modeling censored spatiotemporal data. This study fills this gap by applying a Bayesian spatiotemporal model to analyze interval-censored new HIV diagnoses and left-censored PrEP user data sets in Mississippi at the county level between 2014 and 2018. Suppressed values were modeled with Poisson distributions restricted to ranges where the possible values lie within. A simulation study indicates that the proposed model performs well in estimating censored values and regression coefficients as well as detecting hot spots. At the state level, new HIV diagnoses had a stable trend and PrEP use sharply increased during the study period. DeSoto and Hinds counties warrant special attention because their trends in new HIV diagnoses departed from the state-level trend. We demonstrate that publicly accessible, censored new HIV diagnosis and PrEP user data could be analyzed in ways that yield robust results, which can help health departments and other stakeholders more confidently identify areas that should be prioritized for aggressive HIV prevention.
21-3 PROJECTIONS/FORECASTS
38-8590
Diversity. earth system governance. ecolonial. inclusion. pluriverse.
This short response replies to critiques of my Annals article on decolonizing the Anthropocene (Jackson Citation2021). My response to my critical interlocutors locates differences in the politics of inclusion, plurality, and diversity between perspectives aligning themselves with decoloniality and earth systems governance. I argue that there are, in fact, constitutive differences between our respective positions. These do not preclude bridges to dialogue and understanding.
21-4 MIGRATION
38-8591
ambiguous loss. familial rupture and continuity. intimate geopolitics. irregular maritime migration. thalassocentric imaginaries and actants.
Over the past decade, thousands have been recorded dead or missing after attempting to cross the sea from north Africa to southern Europe. In contrast to the governmental apathy to this plight, behind these missing people are those who steadfastly remain in search, demanding answers and seeking closure. Drawing on an intimate engagement with Tunisian families involved in activism, this article highlights the tripartite lacuna within which they find themselves: The slipping of their sons into the black box of intercontinental “illegal” immigration betrays the contingency of their narratives and the illusiveness of closure. We attend to these families’ responses to finding themselves in search of loved ones effectively, if not actually, lost at sea. By thinking with and through their efforts, we decenter the locus of Mediterranean-borne stories from statist and Eurocentric anxieties to a particular set of subaltern experiences. Linking these intimate geographies to the political landscapes in which they are imbricated serves to show how (inter)subjectivity at the familial scale is not detached from (geo)political imagination. By triangulating between space, stories, and sapience in these families’ experiences, we recognize in their yearning and striving amidst a spatially conditioned injustice an articulation of a familial mythos underpinning a situated geopolitical intervention from below. Still, the families live the day-to-day, their hearts yearning for a reunion here and now, their eyes fixed on the northern (event) horizon. May their eyes find coolness.
38-8592
asylum seekers. Borders. epistemic violence. pushback. Refugees.
Borders are sites of epistemic struggle. Focusing on the illegal tactic of the “pushback,” which is routinely deployed by state authorities to forcefully expel asylum seekers from European Union territory without due process, this article explores the uneven politics of knowledge that helps to support or unsettle this clandestine border violence. Drawing on long-term qualitative research on the Croatia–Bosnia border, including interviews with pushback survivors and activists, as well as a database of border violence reports, we explore the competing truth claims and epistemologies that help to conceal, or counter, the pushback regime. Informed by postcolonial perspectives and contributing to political geographies of violence, we argue that “epistemic violence” (Spivak Citation1988) is a central feature of contemporary borders. We propose that epistemic borderwork is regularly used by state authorities to silence unwanted voices, undermine insurgent perspectives, and stifle the capacity of refugees to draw attention to their own mistreatment. In opposition to this injustice, activists are documenting, mapping, and archiving pushback survivor testimony to construct a counternarrative of refusal, which subverts the harmful knowledge claims of state authorities. In doing so, refugees and activists create epistemic friction, which helps to resist the ontological violence of borders, and “pushes back” against the pushback regime.
38-8593
farm–labor relation. housing justice. Immigration. involuntary servitude. Legal geography. racial banishment. slow violence.
This article examines how the law codifies infrastructural risks into the farm–labor relation, subjecting farmworkers living in U.S. migrant labor camps to conditions considered illegal in otherwise similar residential geographies. To do so, it explores how the labor camp operates as an infrastructure to maximize harvest, arrange labor availability, and embed overlordship—the power to direct other human potentialities through control of their total environment—in a contained geography wherein access to water, shelter, and bodily security is conditional on the employment relation. Using case law pertaining to labor camps in New York, it analyzes the racializing effects of mundane technicalities such as how heating and water systems are inspected, sanitary code is enforced, and housing is classified. Building on insights on infrastructural forms of racial power, it shows how housing and utility systems cement overlordship into the operational landscape of U.S. agriculture and food systems via both the broader immigrant surveillance apparatus and farmworkers’ exclusion from the common-law protections “ordinary” tenants enjoy, such as locally enforced building codes and safety standards. It finds that geographic isolation, infrastructural disconnection, and uneven code enforcement materialize “a pattern of physical restraint” and “real or threatened harm,” components of the legal definition of involuntary servitude. In doing so, it (1) advances a theory of racial overlordship as an infrastructural relation maintained via uneven standards of human treatment, (2) traces the material durability of postemancipation racial overlordship into the present, and (3) demonstrates the powers of camps to variably confine and banish disposable workers.
38-8594
distant water fisheries. human trafficking. labor recruitment. migration trajectories. the Philippines.
The recruitment and deployment of migrant fishers in distant waters (DW) fisheries has emerged as a significant site for the production of unfree labor relations. We trace the recruitment and deployment geographies of migrant fishers from the Philippines to the vessel, conceptualizing the time-spaces of the journey as a significant site for producing unfree labor. We argue that labor brokerage not only establishes the conditions of the labor contract and financialization of migration in the migrants’ home country but is also an ongoing process that intensifies unfreedom through the journey to deployment across multiple sites and temporalities. We conceptualize this movement into exploitative laboring situations as “funnels of unfreedom.” The production of unfreedom through the geographies of recruitment, harboring, and transportation to the destination is one strategy by which DW fleets can reduce costs. The relevance of this discussion extends to other sectors where complex labor brokerage geographies constrain migrant worker choices and fortify unfreedom in labor relations.
22. Economics
22-1 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH
38-8595
asteroids. frontiers. governance. Mining. Space. techno-utopianism.
Outer space holds a special place in the geographical imagination of techno-utopianism. At a time of climate crisis, the mining of celestial bodies, including asteroids, is cast as a possible “tech-driven” response to the need for “green transition” mineral resources in a context of rising geopolitical tensions and concerns over terrestrial extraction. Although still a long way from commercial-scale implementation, outer space mining no longer appears as far-fetched science fiction within the context of a booming “New Space” industry and privatization of celestial commons. Drawing from a growing body of research and critiques of responsible mineral sourcing, we explore some of the legal, political, ethical, and environmental dimensions of outer space mining, and compare them with land-based and deep-sea terrestrial mining. We then point to key areas for further geographical and social sciences enquiries into outer space extractive frontiers, including the uneven distribution of space mining wealth, the impacts on terrestrial mining communities in the Global South, and the reconceptualization of the mining enclave.
38-8596
Anthropocene. Diversity. earth system governance. inclusion. pluralism.
A recent article in this journal (Jackson Citation2021) validly emphasized that debates about the Anthropocene need to recognize a diverse range of perspectives, worldviews, and forms of knowledge. In doing so, however, the author mischaracterized scholarship on earth system governance as being antithetical to a critical and pluralistic stance on the Anthropocene. In this commentary we address key concerns about the article: selective and misleading quotations regarding the earth system governance literature’s diversity; unwarranted insinuations that juxtapose the implications of this literature with those of slavery and holocausts; and neglect of the breadth and diversity of scholarship on earth system governance. We underscore the need for scholarly debates on the Anthropocene to be informed by a balanced and rigorous assessment of existing scholarship, and for a constructive dialogue between global and locally situated ways of understanding the earth.
38-8597
business location choice. consumer preference. Luckin. Starbucks. the New Retail.
The New Retail is an emerging e-commerce model in recent years. It claims innovation in creating competitive advantages through intensive Internet-based data to promote online-to-offline interactions. Whether this self-claimed innovation would cause a different rationale in the choice of store locations is a subject worthy of investigation. In this article, taking Beijing’s Starbucks and Luckin coffee stores as cases, we build a two-layer business location choice model to examine the problem. The model consists of a macroscale (city-wide) submodel and a microscale (street block) submodel. Results show that the macroscale store location choice logics for the two are consistent, with differences predicted by economic geographical laws, thus rejecting the hypothesis of the big-data-driven location choice advantage for the New Retail. Results from the microscale model, however, suggest that the difference between the two brands is better explained with cognition and behavioral theories, where the delivery agents, rather than the customers’ environmental cognition characteristics, shape the New Retail’s peculiar store location preference over less “fancy” urban locales. We argue this unique location preference is indeed something new in the New Retail. We conclude the article with discussions on the relevance of the cognitive and behavioral perspectives in the business location choice problem, and suggest incorporating the microscale layer that explicitly considers these aspects in addressing the problem in real-world settings.
38-8598
data brokers. Debt. global financial crisis. opacity . platform economy. transparency.
Despite the prevalence of transparency discourses in economic life (e.g., postcrisis socioeconomic reforms), scholarship is just beginning to analyze how these discourses produce new relations between market actors in platform economies. In this article, we argue that in the context of financial markets and the political economy of data, transparency functions as a discursive construction that creates suitable conditions for the manufacture and extraction of data as an asset. First, we examine the role of transparency and opacity in various understandings of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (GFC). In doing so we link the emergence of FinTech firms to a careful ex post facto reconstruction of the GFC as what we term a “crisis of data.” Then, through problematizing the idea that transparent economic relations necessarily lead to greater accountability, equity, or public good, we argue that transparency is better understood as a relational practice that is continuously and contingently renegotiated. Taking up the example of debt data, we provide case studies of the data brokerage companies BlackRock and dv01 to analyze how transparency constitutes the material infrastructure of debt markets, which facilitates the construction of data assets for profitable circulation in a financialized political economy. We analyze our case studies with a focus on four transparency practices used to infuse data with value—building relationality, increasing granularity, managing directionality, and creating legibility.
22-3 EMPLOYMENT
38-8599
Caribbean. Democracy. labor geography. postcolonial. trade unions.
This article examines the democratic political praxes and contestations developed by trade unions in relations with the postcolonial state in both the Global North and South. Our work is informed by the scholarship of Richard Iton on the postcolonial duppy state and notions of the colonial past haunting the postcolonial present through the rearticulation of racialized, imperial labor regimes and relations in a postcolonial context. We engage with Trinidad’s Oilfields Workers Trade Union and the British National Union of Seamen to explore how this “haunting” was both contested and modulated by the labor activism of unions in both the former colony and metropole during the period of mid-twentieth-century decolonization. Empirically, we show how unionized workers sought to expand and entrench democratic cultures in opposition to the continued racialization of labor and the uneven power relations existent between labor, the state, and capital. This article responds to recent calls in labor geography to broaden the sites and subjects of study beyond workers in the Global North and introduces a study of the postcolonial state to claims to democratic politics in labor–state relations.
38-8600
Inequality. Job accessibility. journey to work. mobility situation. time and distance.
Recent accessibility research suggests that the relationship between time and distance in the journey to work can produce diverging mobility situations. That is, areas farther away from employment can sometimes have faster commutes than areas closer, and vice versa. This article seeks to advance such research by exploring who is likely to experience which mobility situation. With data from the Census Transportation Planning Products 2012–2016, we examine accessibility in terms of time and distance in the journey to work in New York City to assess the spatial distribution of diverging mobility situations. We conduct a series of binomial logistic regressions and multinomial logistic regression models to assess how socioeconomic characteristics influence the likelihood of experiencing a specific mobility situation while controlling for transportation infrastructure and land-use patterns. The results of our study reveal the diverging mobility patterns across New York City and highlight the importance of socioeconomic characteristics on determining diverging mobility situations.
38-8601
Climate change. Energy. just transition. labor. U.S. South.
In this article, I investigate the origin, limits, and possibilities of just transition as a policy framework to support labor organizing in the energy sector. Just transition first emerged within the labor movement to describe measures to “make whole” workers laid off as the result of necessary environmental policy. Following Gidwani (Citation2015), I analyze claims for income replacement or continued employment as an assertion of “jobs property” based on the collectively bargained standards that unions have negotiated for dangerous jobs in fossil fuel sectors. Although the uses of just transition have grown to encompass broader demands for a democratic and equitable shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy including energy, environmental, and climate justice, I observe that the objectives of labor-centered climate policy often remain focused on the defense of jobs property for dislocated workers. I argue compensation for the loss of jobs property is insufficient to address historical exclusions of people of color and women from energy industry employment or secure the livelihoods of dislocated workers given increasing precarity. Drawing from more than eighty interviews and field work with energy justice campaigns in Atlanta, I consider the case of energy-sector workers in the U.S. South to center a just transition framework that reconstitutes a social wage to address the uneven spatial development of the U.S. labor market.
38-8602
carceral geography. deportation. immigration enforcement. migrant labor. race and labor.
This article examines the upheaval associated with the extension of carceral immigration enforcement into a particular rural county in Washington State. Migrant workers in shellfish, cranberry, and tourism industries began to leave the county, either through the forced mobility of deportation or quasi-voluntarily, to rejoin deported family or to avoid deportation. This process simultaneously constrained the agency of undocumented workers and presented employers with a destabilized race and labor regime that they represented as a labor shortage. In this situation, the local race and labor regime was destabilized, to the detriment of local capitals. This article extends the understanding of the regulation of labor via carceral immigration enforcement, arguing for an understanding of the place-specific and conjunctural nature of the articulation of immigration control and labor regimes. Such an approach reveals how immigration enforcement’s many functions, including the sovereignty-producing and political capital-producing functions, can work in contradiction with the labor regulating, social control functions.
38-8603
Black geographies. labor. Progressive-era advocacy. racial violence. roads.
Following Progressive-era advocacy (1890–1930), a modernized road work site emerged in the U.S. South designed to be populated by mobile fleets of Black imprisoned laborers. The forced road work dislodged U.S. roads from their localized production and maintenance so they could assume an expert-led, technological form—physically and discursively. On the road, however, labor was merely a means of violently reifying hierarchical racial differences, making the “good road” a monument to the modern persistence of state-enacted anti-Blackness. This article assesses the emergence of this regional, racial system of anti-Black violence alongside the undertheorized spatial situation of the imprisoned laborers themselves by consulting the report of Bayard Rustin following time spent on a Roxboro, North Carolina, prison road work camp. The report recounts his own experiences along with those of other men, as well as their songs. The laborers’ firsthand accounts foreground persistent desires for loves, families, and homes beyond the racial capitalist traumas undergirding U.S. transportation geographies.
22-6 SPATIAL ANALYSIS/MODELS
38-8604
mutual information. Permutation tests. relative entropy. spatial heterogeneity. spatial stratified heterogeneity.
As a typical form of spatial heterogeneity, spatial stratified heterogeneity is widely observed in geographical phenomena. Although the q statistic provides a measure of spatial stratified heterogeneity using variance differences, it is not suitable for nominal target variables and neglects information differences between strata at higher order moments. Based on the mutual information and relative entropy between variables, two spatial stratified heterogeneity measures are proposed for nominal and continuous target variables, respectively. Permutation tests are then used to determine their statistical significance. The proposed measures are suitable for either nominal or continuous target variables. They make no assumptions regarding the distribution of target variables, and return a value of zero only when the distribution of the target variable is independent of the explanatory variable. Experiments on five illustrative data sets and three publicly accessible data sets show that the proposed measures are consistent with the q statistic and can detect the existence of spatial stratified heterogeneity when the q statistic fails, so long as there are significant differences between the distributions in different strata.
38-8605
labor geography. logistics and blockades. Mobility. picketing. spatial practice.
By exploring the relationship between picket lines and drivers in 1970s Britain, this article considers how mobility and the spatial practices of trade unionsm shape labor geographies. Focusing on issues raised by work on logistics and blockades, it argues that too much emphasis has been placed on tactics of interruption. Drawing on Toscano’s writings, I suggest that paying attention to the complex entanglement of disruption and control enables a more sophisticated account of workers’ agency. The article explores three key moments in the relationship between picketing and mobility: the Citation1972 miners’ strike, debates over picketing legislation in the mid-1970s, and the road haulage dispute in Citation1979. In doing so, it makes a number of contributions to labor geography. First, it foregrounds the picket line as a key site for understanding the spatialities of working-class organization. Second, it highlights how struggles for control are shaped by competing conceptions of rights and moral economies. Third, it develops thinking on the relationship between mobility and agency by exploring how workers’ power became entangled with the control of movement.
38-8606
Climate. diffusion of towns. feudal urbanization. Poland. temperature.
Urbanization in different regions of the world followed different spatial models. The article presents some characteristic features of urbanization in the area of contemporary Poland, taking into account the driving factors, the climate and soils, as well as the resulting model of spatial evolution of the urban network; that is, contact-based diffusion. The article points out that the spread of towns between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries—that is, from the beginning of urbanization on the contemporary territory of Poland to the end of the feudal period—strongly depended on such factors as air temperature and general natural conditions for the development of agriculture. The research was based on an analysis of more than 1,000 urban foundations, and information on the specific distribution of selected climate phenomena. The article also draws attention to historic climate changes as a factor stimulating the dynamics of urbanization in the analyzed territory. This article provides new information on the specific character of urbanization in the area of today’s Poland, and refers to the problem of environmentally determined diffusion of towns in a considerable area of Central Europe. It also fits into a broader discourse on the role of climatic factors in shaping urban colonization in areas characterized by different climates.
38-8607
Congestion. COVID-19 pandemic. critical health care. spatial accessibility. spatial congestion.
An important variable in measuring potential access is the competitive nature of the service being provided. Health services such as physician visits or hospital beds are often viewed as rival goods where one’s consumption of a service will diminish another’s ability to consume the same service. Congestion at facilities is as important as the overall level of supply at facilities. For rival goods, accessibility and congestion are linked as reciprocal concepts. The relationship between accessibility and congestion is even more important in the current era of the COVID-19 pandemic because critical care services, such as the need for intensive care unit beds, illustrate the need to focus on a balanced level of congestion among hospitals to prevent care failure at the local level. This research investigates the role of service congestion in various existing and proposed models and measures using data from the state of Illinois. Because evenness of service congestion and lower travel times are conflicting goals, evenness of congestion as measured by Gini coefficients is weighed against the cost of travel to determine a compromise solution. Results suggest that the rational agent access model and the congested supply accessibility model provide such compromises when used in conjunction with the transportation problem.
38-8608
belleza estructural. estructura viva. rupturas cabeza-cola. subestructuras. totalidad. vitalidad del espacio.
Geographically aggregated data are often considered to be safe because information can be published by group as population counts rather than by individual. Identifiable information about individuals can still be disclosed when using such data, however. Conventional methods for protecting privacy, such as data swapping, often lack transparency because they do not quantify the reduction in disclosure risk. Recent methods, such as those based on differential privacy, could significantly compromise data utility by introducing excessive error. We develop a methodological framework to address the issues of privacy protection for geographically aggregated data while preserving data utility. In this framework, individuals at high risk of disclosure are moved to other locations to protect their privacy. Two spatial optimization models are developed to optimize these moves by maximizing privacy protection while maintaining data utility. The first model relocates all at-risk individuals while minimizing the error (hence maximizing the utility). The second model assumes a budget that specifies the maximum error to be introduced and maximizes the number of at-risk individuals being relocated within the error budget. Computational experiments performed on a synthetic population data set of two counties of Ohio indicate that the proposed models are effective and efficient in balancing data utility and privacy protection for real-world applications.
38-8609
Bayesian MGWR. Carlo algorithm. multiscale geographically weighted regression. response and different predictors. Spatial analysis. spatial heterogeneity. spatially varying coefficients.
The multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) model is an important extension of the classical geographically weighted regression (GWR) model that can be used to explore the spatial nonstationarity of the regression relationship in spatial analysis, but also allows for different scales on conditional relationships between response and different predictors. A Bayesian version of the MGWR model is proposed to obtain estimates of the spatially varying coefficients and the bandwidths simultaneously. The hierarchical form of the Bayesian MGWR model has attractive features, including obtaining posterior estimates of the bandwidths and local parameters simultaneously, and their uncertainty can be easily measured. For Bayesian posterior inference, an efficient algorithm based on integrated nested Laplace approximation is introduced to provide a great alternative of the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm under the Bayesian framework. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through simulation study, and it is shown that the proposed approach can correctly identify the differences between scales of parameter surfaces and also obtain precise posterior estimates. Finally, for illustration, this approach is used to analyze monthly housing cost data in the state of Georgia.
38-8610
confounding. inference. sample bias. spatial causality. spatially stratified heterogeneity.
Spatial statistics is an important methodology for geospatial data analysis. It has evolved to handle spatially autocorrelated data and spatially (locally) heterogeneous data, which aim to capture the first and second laws of geography, respectively. Examples of spatially stratified heterogeneity (SSH) include climatic zones and land-use types. Methods for such data are relatively underdeveloped compared to the first two properties. The presence of SSH is evidence that nature is lawful and structured rather than purely random. This induces another “layer” of causality underlying variations observed in geographical data. In this article, we go beyond traditional cluster-based approaches and propose a unified approach for SSH in which we provide an equation for SSH, display how SSH is a source of bias in spatial sampling and confounding in spatial modeling, detect nonlinear stochastic causality inherited in SSH distribution, quantify general interaction identified by overlaying two SSH distributions, perform spatial prediction based on SSH, develop a new measure for spatial goodness of fit, and enhance global modeling by integrating them with an SSH q statistic. The research advances statistical theory and methods for dealing with SSH data, thereby offering a new toolbox for spatial data analysis.
38-8611
baseline models. graph neural networks. spatial nonstationarity. spatiotemporal interpolation. temporal nonstationarity.
Spatiotemporal interpolation is a widely used technique for estimating values at unsampled locations using the spatiotemporal dependencies in observations. Classic interpolation models face challenges, however, in dealing with the inherent nonlinearity and nonstationarity of spatiotemporal processes, particularly in sparse and irregularly sampled regions. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel model for spatiotemporal interpolation based on machine learning and graphs, called graph neural network–based spatiotemporal interpolation (GNN-STI). Our approach employs a locally stationary diffusion kernel to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies in both sample-rich and sample-poor areas using a spatiotemporal Voronoi-adjacency graph structure. We evaluate the performance of GNN-STI against four baseline models using two experiments: a simulation experiment with a sample-rich simulated data set, and a real-world PM2.5 experiment involving both sample-rich and sample-poor areas across China. Experimental results demonstrate that GNN-STI provides accurate interpolations with high efficiency in both experiments compared to the baseline models. Therefore, our research presents an effective and practical model for spatiotemporal interpolation in various situations.
38-8612
multiscale geographically weighted regression. negative binomial. spatial heterogeneity. spatial interaction.
In this article, I develop and implement the multiscale geographically weighted negative binomial (MGWNB) model, extending the spatially weighted interaction models by integrating a multiscale framework. This model effectively tackles the multiscale nonstationarity and overdispersion issues found in spatial interaction models. By comparing it with multiscale geographically weighted Poisson regression using simulated data, I demonstrate its superior performance in several aspects, including its capability to estimate the scale of processes, its effectiveness in capturing the spatial heterogeneity, and its ability to produce a better goodness of fit. The application of MGWNB in interprovincial population migration in China, using 2020 Chinese census data, also demonstrates its effectiveness and efficiency, revealing strong multiscale spatial heterogeneity in the migration patterns.
38-8613
COVID-19 pandemic. human mobility. interrupted time-series (ITS) design. mobility intervention policies. spatiotemporal causality inference.
Although there has been a growing interest in causal inference in geography studies, few studies have incorporated spatiotemporal heterogeneities with causalities. This study conceptualizes different patterns of spatiotemporal heterogeneity in the causal effects of policy interventions and develops a spatially interrupted time-series (SITS) quasi-experimental design to causally infer how the treatment effects of mobility control policies during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak vary across space and time, based on a five-month mobile phone big data set from Shenzhen, China. The modeling results reveal and distinguish significant temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal heterogeneities in the policies’ causal effects. For example, we observed an abrupt decrease of 2.8?km in travel distance as a result of the first-level response to public health emergencies (i.e., FLR) and a decrease of 0.5?km as a result of the closed-off management of residential communities (i.e., COM), accounting for 44.6 percent and 7.2 percent of the baseline level before the pandemic, respectively. Such mobility reduction effects decayed at a rate of 0.033?km per day after the FLR and 0.076?km per day after the COM. For both policies, the abrupt effects were significantly larger in neighborhoods with a higher residential density and land-use mixture, lower average age, higher income, and higher marriage rate, whereas the gradual effect of the FLR decayed faster in similar compact neighborhoods. These findings demonstrate the importance of incorporating spatiotemporal variations with causality inference for fine-grained policy assessments, which can help policymakers determine when and where to implement which policies to mediate the mobility and the spread of the pandemic and plan for resilient neighborhoods in the postpandemic era.
38-8614
categorical data. entropogram. multicategorical random function. mutual information. spatial association.
Measures of spatial association are important to reveal the spatial structures and patterns in geographical phenomena. They have utility for spatial interpolation, stochastic simulation, and causal inference, among others. Such measures are abundantly available for continuous spatial variables, whereas for categorical spatial variables they are less well developed. In this research, we developed a measure of spatial association for categorical spatial variables coined the entropogram, quantifying its spatial association using mutual information. Mutual information concerns information shared by pairs of random variables at different locations as revealed by their observed joint frequency distribution and marginal frequency distributions. The developed new measure is modeled as a function of lag in analogy to the variogram. Whereas existing measures focus mainly on interstate relationships, the entropogram models the spatial correlation in categorical spatial variables holistically. In this way, the entropogram imparts multiple advantages, for example, simplifying the representation of spatial structure for categorical variables and facilitating communication. The entropogram also reflects variation in the spatial correlation between different states. We first explored the properties of the entropogram in a simulation study. Then, we applied the entropogram to analyze the spatial association of land cover types in Qinxian, Shanxi, China. We conclude that the entropogram provides a suitable addition to existing measures of spatial association for applications in a wide range of disciplines where the categorical spatial variable is of interest.
22-7 ECONOMIC THEORY
38-8615
anthropogeography. Ellen Churchill Semple. empire. frontiers. liberalism. slavery.
Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), the first woman president of the Association of American Geographers, was a pivotal figure in the formation of twentieth century human geography and geopolitics. Her oeuvre, however, is often situated exclusively within the tradition of Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie. Crucially, an equally important source of inspiration predated Semple’s encounter with the German geographer and remains largely unaccounted for: Anglophone liberal political economy. This article argues that from her 1891 dissertation on slavery until her 1931 book on the geography of the ancient Mediterranean, Semple mobilized a framework of liberal political economy to reconcile tensions she imagined between her country’s legacy of slavery and her support for its growing empire. This strand of her thought highlights the political versatility of anthropogeography and sheds new light on the interplay of geopolitics and liberalism that haunts U.S. security, trade, and migration policy to this day.
22-8 WELFARE ECONOMICS
38-8616
interregional trade. machine learning. prediction. random forest. Web archives. Web data.
Despite the importance of interregional trade for building effective regional economic policies, there are very few hard data to illustrate such interdependencies. We propose here a novel research framework to predict interregional trade flows by utilizing freely available Web data and machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we extract hyperlinks between archived Websites in the United Kingdom and we aggregate these data to create an interregional network of hyperlinks between geolocated and commercial Web pages over time. We also use existing interregional trade data to train our models using random forests and then make out-of-sample predictions of interregional trade flows using a rolling-forecasting framework. Our models illustrate great predictive capability with R2 greater than 0.9. We are also able to disaggregate our predictions in terms of industrial sectors, but also at a subregional level, for which trade data are not available. In total, our models provide a proof of concept that the digital traces left behind by physical trade can help us capture such economic activities at a more granular level and, consequently, inform regional policies.
PHYSICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL
30. Housing and Real Estate
30-1 HOUSING/REAL ESTATE POLICY
38-8617
geographies of home. haptic geographies. ocular-centric and Euro-centric way. the digital. touchscreen.
This article considers haptic—the sense of touch in all its forms—as an assemblage of performative and situated knowledge, multisensory experiences, digital and material relationalities, and everyday practices, that is shaping and shaped by domestic atmospheres and affects. It brings research topics on haptic geographies and geographies of home into the digital context to investigate how routinized domestic practices are digitally organized and managed and how the feelings of being at home are significantly embodied, materially engaged, and socially and affectively charged. The key findings have developed the geographical understanding of home on material, socioemotional, embodied, and multisensory process of home-making by establishing a touching assemblage in the digital context of home. This touching assemblage has affectively created the domestic atmosphere by coalescing practices, materials, apps, global and local platform capitalism, data, bodies, and domestic environments. This article challenges the ocular-centric and Euro-centric way of studying screen-based technologies. It argues for an embodied, affective, and multisensory conceptualization of home in the digital context and a more comprehensive understanding of how the interplay between the human body, space, and technology are implicated in the process of making and remaking geographies of home.
38-8618
historical geography. Minneapolis . Parks. racial covenant. surban greening. white supremacy.
Minneapolis has the twin distinctions of having one of the most highly rated park systems in the United States and some of the most pronounced racial disparities in wealth and homeownership. We argue that this coupling of urban nature and racial inequality was intentionally produced by the city’s real estate industry and local government. Drawing on Mapping Prejudice’s first complete metro-wide map of racial covenants—clauses in property deeds barring sale to anyone not considered white—we pair quantitative spatial analysis with archival research on turn-of-the century greening campaigns and local real estate practices. We use two developments, Nokomis Terrace and Walton Hills, as illustrative examples of the ways in which developers worked with civil society organizations and local government agencies to secure public investments in green amenities, including gardens and public parks, while blanketing their developments with racial covenants. To boost property values, developers paired “greenness” and legal guarantees of whiteness, engineering idealized nature while excluding racialized groups. The result was that 73 percent of park acreage added from 1910 to 1955, the period in which covenants were used in Minneapolis, had at least one racial covenant within 0.1 miles. Our research links urban greening, racialization, housing discrimination, and environmental injustice with consequences for understanding and confronting environmental inequalities today.
30-2 CONSTRUCTION/MAINTENANCE/HOUSING AND BUILDING CODES
38-8619
financial geography. home lending. housing. manufactured housing. Property.
Manufactured housing (MH) communities have emerged as a high-profile and lucrative asset class. Despite this, it is costly or impossible to get loans to buy homes in most mobile home parks. This article explores this ostensible contradiction—that whereas MH parks are desirable and liquid assets, the individual homes that compose them are not. We explore the implications of this contradiction for housing justice as well as financial and environmental vulnerability. We argue that the marginality of MH in U.S. housing markets is rooted in the privileging of real property above personal property. We describe the origins and impacts of this “real property supremacy” in two parts. In the first, we outline the macro-historical context of real property supremacy using a variety of sources, including interviews with federal officials and industry experts as well as document analysis. In the second, we connect this macro context to its micro consequences, drawing on interviews with MH residents, nonprofit and social-service practitioners, and park managers and owners in Tucson, Arizona. We conclude that state-supported property hierarchies create conditions where constrained housing options, semiformal financial practices, and unique tenure forms combine to (re)produce unique and intersecting forms of vulnerability in MH communities.
30-4 HOME OWNERSHIP/RENTAL HOUSING
38-8620
China. gradient-boosting decision trees. Housing prices. nonlinear effects. Proximity. Public facilities.
Housing prices are significantly influenced by the presence of public facilities, such as schools, parks, and transport infrastructure. Whereas existing literature has mainly focused on the proximity of public facilities, this study goes beyond proximity and introduces the concept of quality metrics to evaluate public facilities. By employing the gradient-boosting decision trees approach, we analyze the nonlinear relationships between public facilities and property values in Shenzhen, China. Our study not only quantifies the extent to which the quality of these facilities is capitalized in housing prices, but also examines the interaction effects of quality and proximity on housing prices. Our results reveal that quality variables exhibit a greater relative importance than proximity variables in determining housing prices, and this relationship follows a nonlinear pattern. Furthermore, we investigate the moderating effects of quality on the relationship between proximity and housing prices. We find that the amplifying effects of higher quality are particularly evident in metro stations and public middle schools, whereas the impact of park quality on housing prices is less pronounced. These findings highlight the need to consider both quality and proximity in the supply of public facilities, as they have synergistic effects on housing prices. The nonlinear effects observed in our study can serve as a valuable tool for identifying deficiencies in the supply of public facilities. Additionally, the distinction between proximity and quality, as well as their interaction effects, contributes to our understanding of how the value of public facilities is capitalized in housing markets.
30-8 PUBLIC SECTOR HOUSING
38-8621
generation of planners. housing crisis. pause and think. Planning News. Urban planning.
I am regularly inspired by my students’ capacity to make me pause and think. In January 2023, Rechelle Brookes, Jemima Cummins and Linda Wang, two recent graduates and one current student from the Master of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia where I teach, published an article in the Planning Institute of Australia newsletter Planning News titled “The Culture of Housing: In Conversation.” Writing amidst a housing crisis that is locking out many people from accessing housing, they share with their readers how they are grappling with a challenge unique to their generation of planners: planning a city they themselves cannot afford to live in.
38-8622
Colonialism. Debt. default prevention and management policy. housing. Infrastructure. Water.
The default prevention and management policy (DPMP) is a federal policy that was ostensibly designed to address debt and default in First Nation communities in Canada. The policy works through various levels of external intervention into First Nation finances. According to research findings presented in this article, when First Nations are under the policy a new form of deficit is created rather than improved: Housing stock and water infrastructure becomes much worse off than for First Nations who have never been under the policy. This article puts infrastructure to work as method (Cowen Citation2020) to explore how intimate geographies of infrastructure and “infrastructure denial” (Curley Citation2021), such as housing and water systems on reserves, connect socioeconomic policy frameworks with theories of settler colonial dispossession.
31. Energy
31-4 ENERGY RESOURCES/ALTERNATIVES
38-8623
dams. flow piracy. hydropower. Indigenous languages. Infrastructure. multilingualism.
This article draws on findings of long-term field research in upland central Laos, examining the rapidly changing dynamics of language among multilingual Indigenous communities in the upper reaches of Laos’s massive Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project. The case study of sudden language shift in the context of new transport infrastructure finds disruption of distributional flow at multiple levels, from natural forces to built networks to the circulation of communicative norms and social encounters. This is understood in terms of layered infrastructures, which are distinguished at three main, interarticulated levels: natural (e.g., river systems), technological (e.g., transport networks), and institutional (e.g., language ecologies). A key finding is that linked infrastructures are causally interdependent through mechanisms of flow piracy (intercepting flows and transforming them for new purposes) and percolation (denuding networks and critically reconfiguring them). The case study from Laos of rapid change in the context of a hydropower dam not only refines our conception of infrastructure, but the idea of language itself as an infrastructure helps us to better understand its spatialized dynamics, foregrounding language as a new empirical domain in the study of infrastructure and other socially spatialized networks.
38-8624
ecological minimum volume. endorheic watershed. Lake Atotonilco. lake bathymetry. playa lake.
Lake Atotonilco is a shallow saline water body located in the central-west portion of Mexico. The lake is in the low plain of an endorheic watershed. It is shallow, with a large area of surrounding wetlands and serves as a refuge for dozens of native and migratory waterfowl. Its extremely flat morphometric features coupled with the precipitation and runoff regime from the watershed cause significant changes in the lake surface area and storage volume throughout the year. In recent years, the lake has behaved as an intermittent lake, remaining practically dry in June, and reaching its highest storage volume in October. An ecological water volume that the lake must maintain to support its biodiversity was estimated. This minimum lake storage volume can only be achieved if public policies are implemented to rationalize the use of water resources in the basin and to protect the few forest areas that remain in the watershed.
38-8625
Onshore wind. renewables. repowering. temporality. Time. wind energy.
Onshore wind farms are reaching the end of their operational or consent life and we need to consider how to plan for the future. This paper draws upon detailed empirical data from four UK case studies to understand the range and impact of changes that occur over the life of operational wind farms, including economic, policy, landscape and community changes and how these changes impact decisions regarding the future. In doing so it reveals the challenges of using time-limited consents without adequate consideration of the future. It also demonstrates the benefits for planning of adopting a multiple temporalities approach.
31-6 ENERGY SYSTEMS PLANNING
38-8626
Arctic-boreal lakes. geospatial analysis. methane emissions. spatial regression. up-scaling.
Arctic-boreal lakes emit methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas. Recent studies suggest ebullition might be a dominant methane emission pathway in lakes but its drivers are poorly understood. Various predictors of lake methane ebullition have been proposed but are challenging to evaluate owing to different geographical characteristics, field locations, and sample densities. Here we compare large geospatial data sets of lake area, lake perimeter, permafrost, land cover, temperature, soil organic carbon content, depth, and greenness with remotely sensed methane ebullition estimates for 5,143 Alaskan lakes. We find that lake wetland fraction (LWF), a measure of lake wetland and littoral zone area, is a leading predictor of methane ebullition (adj. R2 = 0.211), followed by lake surface area (adj. R2 = 0.201). LWF is inversely correlated with lake area, thus higher wetland fraction in smaller lakes might explain a commonly cited inverse relationship between lake area and methane ebullition. Lake perimeter (adj. R2 = 0.176) and temperature (adj. R2 = 0.157) are moderate predictors of lake ebullition, and soil organic carbon content, permafrost, lake depth, and greenness are weak predictors. The low adjusted R2 values are typical and informative for methane attribution studies. Our leading model, which uses lake area, temperature, and LWF (adj. R2 = 0.325, n?=?5,130) performs slightly better than leading multivariate models from similar studies. Our results suggest landscape-scale geospatial analyses can complement smaller field studies, for attributing Arctic-boreal lake methane emissions to readily available environmental variables.
32. Environment
32-1 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
38-8627
Bølling-Allerød interstadial. Climate amelioration. inland aeolian dunes. OSL dating. Paleogeographic reconstruction . paleosols.
Environmental studies based on analyses of fluvio-aeolian successions with paleosols in central Poland, forming the central part of the European Sand Belt, are presented. Paleogeographic reconstruction was based on high-resolution analyses of four sites using sedimentological and paleopedological methods as well as forty-four optically stimulated luminescence and fourteen radiocarbon dating measurements. Age-identified individual lithological and soil units were first correlated between sites, emphasizing the differences between them. The results were then correlated with Greenland ice-core stratigraphic units reflecting global environmental changes in the Late Pleniglacial and Lateglacial interstadial, thus ranging from GS-2.1a, through the GI-1 complex (seven subunits), to GS-1. Studies revealed considerable sensitivity of fluvio-aeolian succession to climate changes and oscillations. Climate ameliorations are recorded in fossil soil horizons developed beneath different types of vegetation cover. We detected that the climate cooling GI-1d (the Older Dryas) was not the main phase of dune formation as had been claimed earlier. It is postulated that dunes in the extraglacial zone were formed mainly in GI-1c2 (the Early Allerød). Preexisting dunes were transformed in GS-1 (the Younger Dryas) and in the Early Holocene, locally interrupted by soil formation.
38-8628
aging in place. path analysis. person–environment fit. place attachment. sociospatial experiences.
Acquiring sociospatial experiences at nested geographical scales is a lifelong meaning construction process, and this has great implications for aging in place. Various experiences trigger older people’s attitudinal and sentimental reflections regarding how they evaluate and attach themselves to where they live; this invokes residential satisfaction, and subsequently, place attachment. Through a questionnaire survey of 501 community-dwelling individuals aged sixty-five and older in Hong Kong, an ultra-high-density Asian city, this article examines the relationship between sociospatial experiences and well-being through a sequential path analysis model. It identifies five dimensions of sociospatial experiences: “homes and housing estate,” “social environment,” “living convenience,” “pedestrian experience,” and “blue and green” features. All dimensions predict emotional, social, and psychological well-being via residential satisfaction and then place attachment. Place attachment is a more robust mechanism than residential satisfaction in the environment–well-being association. Developing a satisfying relationship, and subsequently, functional and emotional links with the place of residence, is conducive to achieving well-being. This uncovers an important mechanism of person–environment interactions for aging in place.
32-2 ENVIRONMENTAL MODELING
38-8629
Environmental governance. environmental politics. nature–society relations. race and law. rights of nature.
In this article, we explore rights of nature (RoN) as an emerging rights-based environmental governance that intends to reframe nature from property to an entity with a right to exist unharmed. Its proponents claim this is a paradigm shift that reworks the imbalanced human–nature hierarchy. We interrogate this claim using data collected from more than 60?U.S. communities where RoN ordinances have been implemented. Our analysis identifies three reoccurring themes within the U.S. settler colonial context, including a coconstitution of rights for nature alongside a community’s right to a healthy environment, the emphasis of self-governance and individual community empowerment, and the overwhelming Whiteness of settler communities that implement RoN laws. We put these themes into conversation with critical race scholarship, which evaluates the racialized impacts of a liberal legal system of rights to examine how within the U.S. settler colonial context RoN mobilizes Western White liberal conceptions of legal rights to address our current environmental crises. In analyzing these themes through the lens of critical race scholarship, we contend that rights-based environmental governance in the form of RoN laws appears to reinforce many of the entrenched social-legal-environmental relations that characterize White liberalism recast through a language that claims universal rights.
38-8630
hydrological processes. Scales. spatial network. stream distance. Water quality.
We developed a novel spatial stream network geographically weighted regression (SSN-GWR) by incorporating stream-distance metrics into GWR. The model was tested for predicting seasonal total nitrogen (TN) and total suspended solids (TSS) concentrations in relation to watershed characteristics for 108 sites in the Han River Basin, South Korea. The SSN-GWR model was run with the average seasonal water quality parameters from 2012 through 2016 and was validated with the data from 2017 through 2021. The model fit among ordinary least square regression, standard GWR (STD-GWR), and stream distance weighted SSN-GWR were compared based on their ability to explain the variation of seasonal water quality parameters. We also compared residual spatial autocorrelations as well as various error parameters from these models. Compared to the STD-GWR model, the SSN-GWR model generally provided better model fit, reduced residual spatial autocorrelation, and lessened overall modeling errors. Results show that the spatial patterns of model fit, as well as various coefficients from the upstream distance weighted regressions, capture local patterns as a product of upstream–downstream relations. We demonstrate that a successful model could be developed by integrating stream distance into the GWR, which not only improves model fit but also reveals realistic hydrological processes that relate watershed characteristics to water quality along with the stream network. The local variations in model fit derived from this work can be used to devise fine-scale interventions for water quality improvements in a spatially heterogeneous complex river basin.
38-8631
critical toponymies. logistic regression. politics of memory. postsocialism. Romania. street names.
Political geographers and sociologists working in the field of critical toponymies have demonstrated that renaming the streetscape follows invariably after a regime change. Scholars have barely gone beyond documenting the extent of toponymic change at the level of particular places, however, usually the capital cities of countries from the former socialist bloc and other postdictatorial societies. This article sets out to address toponymic changes at the country level, by examining the complete national street nomenclature in postsocialist urban Romania. For this purpose, a data set comprising the entire collection of urban street names in Romania, together with all the street name changes that occurred during postsocialism, was constructed from multiple sources (N?=?37,076). A series of multilevel logistic regression analyses were performed to model statistically the effects of various street- and locality-level variables on postsocialist street renaming. The results of these multilevel logistic regression analyses indicate that toponymic revision after the fall of state socialism is shaped by the intersection of street-level properties (e.g., artery class and features regarding the street name itself) and locality-level characteristics (e.g., the historicity of urban status and the ethnopolitics played out at the level of each city and town). The article is the first to analyze the shifting political geography of urban nomenclatures at a national level based on a complete data set of street names. The analytical model advanced in this article, based on postsocialist Romania, could be used to inform similar research on other geographical settings and historical contexts.
32-3 ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING
38-8632
Anthropocene. labor. Plantationocene. political economy. tea plantation. Vegetal geography.
A Plantationocene is a threshold for understanding planetary change. Rather than attributing environmental transformations to the universal agency of humankind, a Plantationocene grounds the alteration of landscape in histories of colonialism and race, and takes the plantation to be a pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures. This article develops a vegetal geography of a Plantationocene, engaging relations between plants and people as well as the role plants play as mediators of habitability in a landscape. It argues that such geographies influence and are underscored by the exploitation of labor, violent enclosures of land, and the quest to profit from both human and other-than-human life. Vegetal geographies are tracked in three conceptual registers: the vegetal agency of plants put into circulation by plantations, vegetal economies centered on labor power and the work plants do, as well as the vegetal politics of landscape change proceeding though an ecology of relations and the asymmetric exercise of power. This reading of a Plantationocene and its vegetal geographies brings scholarship on planetary transformations into closer dialogue with colonial history and postcolonial political economy. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of the Adivasi community, elephants, and tea plantations in Assam, northeast India.
38-8633
Anthropocene. labor. Plantationocene. political economy. tea plantation. Vegetal geography.
A Plantationocene is a threshold for understanding planetary change. Rather than attributing environmental transformations to the universal agency of humankind, a Plantationocene grounds the alteration of landscape in histories of colonialism and race, and takes the plantation to be a pivotal engine for producing novel but fraught natures. This article develops a vegetal geography of a Plantationocene, engaging relations between plants and people as well as the role plants play as mediators of habitability in a landscape. It argues that such geographies influence and are underscored by the exploitation of labor, violent enclosures of land, and the quest to profit from both human and other-than-human life. Vegetal geographies are tracked in three conceptual registers: the vegetal agency of plants put into circulation by plantations, vegetal economies centered on labor power and the work plants do, as well as the vegetal politics of landscape change proceeding though an ecology of relations and the asymmetric exercise of power. This reading of a Plantationocene and its vegetal geographies brings scholarship on planetary transformations into closer dialogue with colonial history and postcolonial political economy. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of the Adivasi community, elephants, and tea plantations in Assam, northeast India.
38-8634
authoritarian populism. conservation. Environmental governance. neo-extractivism. Neoliberalism. posttruth.
Recent scholarship links authoritarian populism to environmental governance and changing forms of neoliberalism, yet the central role of the contradiction between territory demarcated for (neo)extractivism and territory demarcated for conservation and protection is heavily understated. This article analyzes the rise of posttruth politics in Brazil as an effort to legitimate unmitigated extractive capitalist growth through a renewed obfuscation of this inherent ecological contradiction. We first demonstrate the concealment of the contradiction through Latin America’s “post-neoliberal” period, based in a neoextractivist economic model. Following, we argue that posttruth politics represents a specific attempt to supersede the previous neoliberal consensus in the face of shrinking commodity returns. Designed to downplay, deny, and remove existing public environmental concerns, we view the posttruth of authoritarian populism as a necessarily spatial project, beyond accounts of cultural or institutional politics alone. The article thus furthers understandings of posttruth by centralizing its role in obscuring the extractivism–conservation contradiction in Brazil and beyond, and as such aligns with a critical effort to mobilize alternatives to the untenable reprimarization of Latin American societies.
38-8635
embodiment. empirical field work. feminist political ecology. Intersectionality. participatory mapping. water security.
The linkages between water insecurity and human health have been of long-standing research interest to geographers, especially those studying the human–environment dimensions of health. This article contributes to this scholarship by demonstrating how insecure access to irrigation water produces differentiated bodily effects for women. Data for the article come from empirical field work using interviews, focus group discussions, drone-based participatory mapping, and community validation workshops. Grounded in the literature on embodiment and intersectional feminist political ecology and through the firsthand experiences of women and their struggles to secure irrigation water, the article makes two main contributions. First, it demonstrates how drones could be innovatively integrated into qualitative and political ecology field work to better understand human–environment interactions. Second, it shows that space and time are critical to understanding the differentiated embodied experiences of water insecurity. More specifically, different irrigators experience different bodily effects depending on where their irrigated fields are located. Compared to women with plots near irrigation canals, the article shows that those with plots further afield experience more debilitating pains in the limbs, waist, and hips as they struggle to secure water. Overall, the article’s findings highlight how the uneven geographies of access to irrigation water warrant closer attention by scholars studying hydrosocial relations and health.
38-8636
Belt and Road Initiative. China. Environment. Global governance. governmentality .
This article proposes a global environmentality framework to critique efforts to “green” the Belt and Road Initiative (or Green BRI) by examining the Chinese state’s environmental governance of extraterritorial spaces. The article transcends a focus within governmentality studies on domestic processes to reveal the relations between governance techniques and environmental subjects, including state and nonstate actors, beyond sovereign borders. Drawing on interviews, observations, and analysis of policies and reports, we identify three ways in which global environmentalities operate and are negotiated through the Green BRI. First, the Chinese state is embracing international sustainable development criteria to gain global legitimacy while seeking to export its domestic environmental governance model, making the Green BRI a dialectic policy. Second, the state is targeting and disciplining BRI participants, including Chinese financial institutions, construction companies, the renewable industry, and foreign state actors in BRI countries. Third, Chinese and BRI partner country participants’ variegated subjectivities arise out of the negotiation of their own interests, Chinese state interests, and BRI host country concerns. Our analysis contributes to understanding of how China, as a rising power, engages in global environmental governance and produces extraterritorial environmental subjects.
38-8637
abolition. Bloom Project. breath. Environmental justice. praxis. Youth.
This article contributes to the growing literature bringing together environmental justice (EJ) and abolition, offering the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project in San Antonio, Texas, as a case of abolitionist EJ praxis. I argue that the Bloom Project disrupts capitalist and colonial relations, even if only provisionally, through radical space- and place-making that allow alternative worlds to emerge. “I can’t breathe” has been an embodiment and structure of feeling that reflects the historical patterns of policing and pollution across racialized geographies in the United States and connects historical patterns of racial capitalism and colonialism. I suggest that the Bloom Project is a model of how we can move from “I can’t breathe” to imagining and growing worlds where we can breathe. By foregrounding the work of the Bloom Project, this article moves away from analyses primarily focused on highlighting the ways that low-income communities of color are toxic and toward the ways that communities are imagining and practicing alternative ways of being, embodying the worlds they desire. I demonstrate how abolitionist EJ praxis contributes to the liberation of carceral geographies and toxic ways of relating to ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world by providing alternative relationalities based on affirming and sustaining lifeways.
32-4 RISK MANAGEMENT/IMPACT ASSESSMENT
38-8638
Climate change. FireSmart. governance. Neoliberalism. Security. Wildfires.
This article argues that the governance of wildfire risk in Canada is increasingly oriented toward governance through a security apparatus. As climate change complicates wildfire “problems” in fast-expanding wildland–urban interface areas, fire managers and other actors increasingly seek a shift toward a fire-permitting, risk-based fire management style, even as the balance between private and public responsibility for wildfire protection gets renegotiated. This approach, typified by FireSmart, is characterized by a gradual, geographically uneven shift from state-centered fire suppression toward a multiplicity assembled around an expectation of security and the promise of economic freedom. These multiple shifts, we argue, reflect a characteristic approach to governing through the Foucauldian “apparatus of security,” a mechanism of power that seeks security through economic freedom and indirect governmental intervention. Central to the emerging apparatus of wildfire security are three core rationalizing discourses focused on the valorization of the individual’s capacity for wildfire management and protection, the negotiation of limits of state and public institutions in wildfire management, and the invitation to live resiliently with wildfires by embracing biophysical contingency. At stake is the complex politics through which the very ideas of wildfire risk, responsibility, and security are being, and can be, reconstituted. Our analysis furthers the poststructural geographies of wildfires and climate risk governance in Canada and beyond.
38-8639
Biodiversity. commodification. global production networks. hunting tourism. Namibia. valuation of nature.
Southern African ecosystems are threatened by biodiversity loss, but it remains highly controversial whether nature conservation can be successfully achieved by commodifying ecosystems through tourism or by withdrawing habitats from their integration into globalized production. This article contributes to the debate by applying the global production network (GPN) approach to analyze institutional dynamics and actors involved in the commodification of nature. While highlighting historical drivers of GPN articulation, we advance the GPN framework by integrating a practice-based perspective on value making. Based on archival research, qualitative interviews and quantitative data, this contribution examines the historical and current commodification of wildlife in the Zambezi region in northeastern Namibia. Under the umbrella of the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) policy, the postapartheid government allows the regulated harvesting of individual animals for hunting tourism. This policy mobilizes wildlife as an endogenous natural asset that is embedded in the region. As a consequence, local institutions emerge that enable strategic coupling processes with the global hunting industry to initiate development trajectories in the remote region. The historical perspective, however, reveals that former elites are able to take advantage of these newly emerging opportunities and maintain a powerful position in the GPN until today. The analysis shows three mechanisms that drive the valuation of nature: local institution building, quota making, and revenue sharing. We conclude that the valuation of nature is a way of mobilizing regional assets through strategic coupling and gains realized from this commodification are used to build local institutions that ensure ongoing valuation.
38-8640
geospatial heterogeneities. health geography. interregional population interaction. spatiotemporal analysis. transmission modeling.
Infectious disease spread is a spatiotemporal process with significant regional differences that can be affected by multiple factors, such as human mobility and manner of contact. From a geographical perspective, the simulation and analysis of an epidemic can promote an understanding of the contagion mechanism and lead to an accurate prediction of its future trends. The existing methods fail to consider the mutual feedback mechanism of heterogeneities between the interregional population interaction and the regional transmission conditions (e.g., contact probability and the effective reproduction number). This disadvantage oversimplifies the transmission process and reduces the accuracy of the simulation results. To fill this gap, a general model considering the spatiotemporal characteristics is proposed, which includes compartment modeling of population categories, flow interaction modeling of population movements, and spatial spread modeling of an infectious disease. Furthermore, the correctness of a theoretical hypothesis for modeling and prediction accuracy of this model was tested with a synthetic data set and a real-world COVID-19 data set in China, respectively. The theoretical contribution of this article was to verify that the interplay of multiple types of geospatial heterogeneities dramatically influences the spatial spread of infectious disease. This model provides an effective method for solving infectious disease simulation problems involving dynamic, complex spatiotemporal processes of geographical elements, such as optimization of lockdown strategies, analyses of the medical resource carrying capacity, and risk assessment of herd immunity from the perspective of geography.
38-8641
ecological regions. geographic isolation. resource extraction. spatial regression. Vulnerability.
Geographically isolated places are often sites of exported environmental risks, intense resource extraction, exploitation and marginalization, and social policy neglect. These conditions create unique challenges related to vulnerability and adaptation that have direct disaster management implications. Our research investigates the relationship between geographic isolation and flood-related social vulnerability across Peru’s ecological regions. Ecoregions have different relationships with colonialism and capitalism that shape vulnerability, and we hypothesize that the relationship between vulnerability and geographic isolation varies across ecoregions. Using mapping techniques and spatial regression analysis, we find that relationships between vulnerability and geographic isolation vary regionally, with differences that suggest alignment with regional contexts of extraction. We find notable differences in vulnerability related to public health infrastructure and access to services and between ecoregions with sharply contrasting histories of natural resource extraction and investment and disinvestment.
32-5 ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY/POLLUTION
38-8642
air pollution perception. association rule mining. neighborhood effect averaging problem. nonstationarity. social inequality.
Using individual-level data collected from two communities in Hong Kong, this study proposes a significant association rule mining method to identify the complex associations between individual socioeconomic characteristics and perceived air pollution in people’s daily life. It defines a measure, namely the rule inequality index, to assess the social inequality in perceived exposure to air pollution in both residential and visited neighborhoods. The results indicate that the associations between individual socioeconomic characteristics and perceived air pollution are not always consistent over communities, nor are the value ranges of perceived air pollution. Further, the tendency of different social groups to perceive high levels of air pollution can differ considerably depending on whether they are in their residential or visited neighborhoods. We also find that social groups based on different socioeconomic variables typically experience varying degrees of neighborhood effects on the associated social equalities. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering nonstationary associations and human mobility in research on social inequality related to mobility-dependent environmental exposure.
38-8643
Air pollution. capacity. intensity. southwest wind preservation. wind–human relationship.
Air pollution creates significant challenges, particularly in countries undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization. Wind, a strong agency in moving polluting to and away, however, does not attract sufficient attention from the social science literature on urban health and air pollution. This article fills this gap by proposing the concept of wind–human resonance, referring to both the capacity and intensity of the wind as two kinds of human–wind relationships in the weather-world. On the one hand, certain cleaning and blocking practices are carried out by residents, corresponding to the wind’s carrying capacity of air pollutants; fishing activities are altered according to the wind capacity in the atmo-oceanic dynamic. On the other hand, the intensity of the wind envelops an industrialized coastal village where community members engage with the oceanic wind that shapes the community identity (and affect). This framework of an entangled human–wind relationship is empirically examined through the case of the coastal Dalinpu area of Kaohsiung in southwestern Taiwan, a community that has successfully organized a campaign in the name of “southwest wind preservation” to terminate an industrial zone construction project. By revealing how wind is physically and affectively entangled into urban politics, this article aims to foreground the air flow study in volume geography in particular and the human–environment relationship in general.
38-8644
capitalist reproduction. logic of improvement. postwar racialization. settler colonialism. socionatural metabolism. water quality management.
This article explores the postwar racialization of socionatural metabolisms as Michigan consolidated its capacities to regulate water pollution in the St. Clair–Detroit River corridor. These unceded waters flow through the traditional territories of the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississauga, and Wyandot nations, as well as the heavily industrialized, urbanized, and racially segregated geographies of southeast Michigan. Drawing on archival records, I examine discursive constructions of White settler and Indigenous water metabolisms that coarticulated with Michigan’s growing concern that unchecked water pollution posed a metabolic barrier to industrial manufacturing. I situate these representations against the state’s emerging objective to reconcile two interconnected forms of waste: (1) the material degradation of water attributed to Michigan’s advanced capitalist economy, and (2) the wasted economic potential long used to denigrate Indigenous societies that “failed” to extract capitalist value from nature. This case study demonstrates how Michigan’s discursive approach to managing a potential crisis of capitalist reproduction also reconfigured the logic of improvement as the racial and economic basis for settler colonial authority over nature. “Improving” nature was not only about facilitating access to nature for capitalist production, but reproducing—indefinitely—the ecological conditions on which capitalist production relied. This article builds on two lines of inquiry in critical geographic scholarship exploring mutually constitutive relationships between race and socionatural metabolisms, and between settler colonialism and environmental degradation, to interrogate the postwar discourses flowing through water management in southeast Michigan, a region where water remains at the center of multiple racialized dispossessions and their ongoing contestation.
32-6 CATASTROPHES/DISASTERS/EMERGENCIES
38-8645
behavior modeling. disaster preparedness. Hazards. household preparedness. multilevel regression and poststratification.
Disaster events, such as floods, wildfires, and earthquakes, increasingly cause damage to livelihoods, the economy, and the environment. Preparing for disasters is noted as one of the most effective ways to adapt and increase resilience to these events, but research has shown that many people in the United States have not adopted recommended household preparedness actions. Moreso, there is currently no geospatial data set or tool for mapping geographic variation in disaster preparedness behavior, despite the availability of appropriate survey data. Using the Federal Emergency Management Agency National Household Survey from 2017 to 2020, we develop a multilevel regression and poststratification model that provides estimates at the state, county, and zip-code tabulation area scales of several preparedness actions and a general disaster preparedness index. Results show regional and state-level variation among preparedness levels, with the Southeast and Utah being generally more prepared than other regions of the United States. Additionally, we introduce an online interactive mapping tool for these results that practitioners, academics, and the public can use to identify preparedness levels in their area of interest. The outcomes of this study can be used to inform future work in hazard risk assessment and to further develop comparisons between risk perceptions and hazard preparedness. Finally, findings from this study contribute to the suite of geospatial models and methods used to assess the human dimensions of hazard risk and resilience.
38-8646
dasymetric mapping. Environmental justice. FEMA. flood risk. Houston. race/ethnicity.
In the United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) delineates 100-year flood zones to define risks, regulate flood insurance premiums, and inform flood management. Evidence indicates that FEMA flood maps are incomplete, calling much of our current knowledge of U.S. flood hazard inequities into question. We use a state-of-the-art flood hazard model and census tract-level dasymetrically mapped sociodemographic data to examine flood risk inequities in the Greater Houston area, where increasingly frequent and damaging flood events are occurring. We innovate by analyzing federally overlooked 100-year flood risks (100-year flood zones delineated by the flood hazard model that are outside of FEMA 100-year flood zones). Results indicate that nearly 1 million Greater Houston residents live in federally overlooked 100-year flood zones. Black and Asian neighborhoods experience disproportionate risk in federally overlooked pluvial and fluvial flood zones, and Hispanic neighborhoods experience disproportionate risk in all federally overlooked zones (coastal, pluvial, and fluvial). High flood risk and the relative lack of protective resources in federally overlooked 100-year flood zones doubly jeopardizes racial and ethnic minority communities. Our findings and recent flood disasters suggest that future flood impacts in Greater Houston will be catastrophic and unjust unless FEMA revises their risk mapping and management approach to promote long-term public safety and social equity.
38-8647
Australia. Climate change. loss and damage. temporality. time geography.
I contribute to an emerging politics of loss through an empirical analysis of temporalities of climate change loss and damage in Australia. How people temporalize climate change informs their conception of causality, designation of losses and damages, and political response. By drawing attention to the diversity of onto-epistemological understandings and characterizations of climate change loss and damage, I illuminate some of the values diverse actors perceive as currently, or at risk of, being lost. I do this by unearthing and theorizing commonly identified temporalities held by a cross-section of social actors in regional Australia. These include the following temporalities: (1) anticipatory loss; (2) natural variability; (3) future perfect (e.g., climate catastrophe, human ingenuity); and (4) the longue durée (i.e., climate change as a historical crisis linked to colonial-capitalism). I consider the social, cultural, psychological, and political determinants of such temporalities and the implications for climate politics in Australia. I argue that recognizing the complexity of temporalities of loss and damage is crucial for both geographical research and climate politics. This nuanced understanding of difference can contribute toward the development of a progressive more-than-climate politics, which, I suggest, must be based on the longue durée temporality of climate change loss and damage.
38-8648
brick industry. Climate change. climate precarity. environmental degradation. Globalization. material flows.
Climate-linked disasters result when natural hazards meet socioeconomic precarity. Recognizing this, scholarship in recent years has emphasized how the precarity that turns climate-linked hazards into disasters is produced within the same global political economy that enables climate change. Nevertheless, despite growing interest in the ways in which the dynamics of global economic history shapes contemporary hazard vulnerability, less attention has been directed toward the dynamism of the contemporary global economy and particularly the ways in which global material flows shape environmental risk. From this standpoint, this article argues, first, the need to account for the economic dynamics of global trade in shaping the factors that intensify disaster risk, and second, the role of multiscalar agency. Exemplifying this issue through a case study of international brick imports from South Asia to the United Kingdom, the article provides a heuristic example of how contemporary globalized flows of goods link local vulnerabilities to economic processes originating thousands of miles away. In an increasingly globalized world, it thus foregrounds a dynamic, global perspective on the genus of climate precarity.
38-8649
evacuation behavior. Maps. risk perception. small-area estimations. survey data.
“Behavior-blind” risk assessments, mapping, and policy do not account for individual responses to risks, due to challenges in collecting accurate information at scales relevant to decision-making. There is useful spatial information in social survey data that is sometimes analyzed for spatial patterns despite potential biases. This article explores whether risk perception and adaptive behavior can be inferred from census and hazard exposure data with a specifically designed survey. An underlying question is what precautions surveys should take before mapping the results. We find that a hybrid multilevel regression and (synthetic) poststratification (MRP-MRSP) model can facilitate the transition from individual survey data to small-area estimations at different scales, including 200-m grid cells. We demonstrate this model using municipal-level survey data collected in the Paris region, France. We find that model accuracy is not decreased at finer scales provided there is a strong spatial predictor such as hazard exposure. Our findings show that a wide range of flood risk perception and evacuation behavior can be estimated with such downscaling techniques. Although this type of modeling is not yet commonly used among geographers, our study suggests that it can improve mapping of survey results and, in particular, can provide spatially explicit behavioral information for risk assessment and policy.
38-8650
climate gentrification. climate hazards. Floods. hedonic model. property price.
There is growing evidence that physical climate hazards—such as floods and wildfires—affect property prices. Climate change scenarios suggest more frequent and severe physical climate hazards in the future, coinciding with greater exposure of populations to such threats. This raises concern because changes in property prices pose risks to homeowners’ financial status, as well as to the insurance and mortgage industries, bank portfolios, and thereby financial systems. We begin with a new definition of climate gentrification (CG) that captures links between physical climate hazards, perceptions of risk and resilience, and capital flows in property markets. This is followed by a structured assessment of the key drivers of CG, and an empirical case study of property data for a flood-prone UK city to demonstrate how CG depressed house price growth over the period from 2005 to 2018 by up to 50 percent in flood-exposed (relative to unexposed) locations. We then provide a discussion of ethical concerns around CG research, with suggested ways forward. Such price signals have potential ramifications for the long-term stability of real estate markets and raise policy implications for private and public sectors. We conclude with some priorities for further research into CG, recognizing key information and data gaps, and noting how existing knowledge and tools could contribute toward improved resilience to climate change. Key Words: climate gentrification, climate hazards, flood, hedonic model, property prices.
38-8651
disaster management. misinformation. sentiment contagion. social media. Social networks.
Misinformation disseminated via online social networks can cause social confusion and result in inadequate responses during disasters and emergencies. To contribute to social media-based disaster resilience, we aim to decipher the spread of disaster misinformation and its correction through the case study of the disaster rumor during Hurricane Sandy (2012) on Twitter. We first leveraged social network analysis to identify different types of accounts that are influential in spreading and debunking disaster misinformation. Second, we examined how the spatiotemporal proximity to the rumor event influences the sharing of misinformation and the sharing of corrections on Twitter. Third, through sentiment analysis, we went further by examining how spatiotemporal and demographic similarity between social media users affect behavioral and emotional responses to misinformation. Finally, sentiment contagion across rumor and correction networks was also examined. Our findings generate novel insights into detecting and counteracting misinformation using social media with implications for disaster management.
38-8652
accumulated cyclone energy. Florida peninsula. hurricanes. inland wind risk. tropical cyclone.
This article introduces an accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) approach for estimating the return period of tropical cyclone (TC) wind risk in Florida. As opposed to calculating return periods directly from maximum sustained wind speed, the ACE-based approach also describes the duration of the strong winds, giving an additional dimension to the assessment of TC wind risks. Because Florida is a peninsula, TCs can move across the state within six hours of landfall, causing an underestimation of the inland wind footprint if only the six-hour reanalysis track points are employed as an input data source. This study uses four different scenarios and an inland exponential decay function to interpolate the wind speed between the six-hour reanalysis track points to feed the ACE-based return period calculation based on a 121-year record from 1900 to 2020. South Florida has the shortest return period (five to ten?years) of TCs with an ACE equivalent to one hour of hurricane intensity (= 64?kt; 1?kt ~ 0.51?m s-1) caused by intense historical hurricane strikes, and Polk County in inland central Florida has an equal return period due to frequent and long-duration TC occurrences, acting as an intersection for landfalling TCs in the Florida peninsula.
32-7 SUSTAINABILITY
38-8653
agriculture. climate change adaptation. climate justice. Decision making. Ghana.
Climate change adaptation is a power-laden process that requires engagement and negotiation between people with diverse needs, interests, and levels of authority. Entrenched hierarchies in adaptation decision making influence what is considered legitimate policy and action, whose values are prioritized, and the interests of which actors are excluded. Through content and discourse analysis of interviews and focus group discussions with policymakers and decision makers across multiple spatial and jurisdictional levels, we illustrate how specific actors involved in adaptation efforts comprehend and engage with tensions, institutional politics, and community-level power dynamics, focusing on the experiences of rural farmers who are often sidelined in adaptation processes. We advance critical scholarship on the politics of adaptation and the politics of scale to demonstrate how power relations move within and across levels of decision making, by scrutinizing the discursive and material construction of scales and subjects. We argue that nuanced investigations of power and its (re)production across levels and scales are crucial to expose the underrepresentation of marginalized citizens in adaptation debates and to envision subversive political interventions toward climate justice.
38-8654
advocacy. craft beer. qualitatively informed quantitative analysis (mixed methods). Social justice. Sustainability.
Over the past several decades, craft brewing has altered physical and cultural landscapes across the United States as fermentation industries have increasingly been at the center of civic (re)development activities. Fermented landscapes are now ubiquitous, producing and maintaining a variety of public goods, whether perceived as beneficial or not. Some breweries offer highly visible examples of advocacy efforts, including the pursuit and promotion of environmental sustainability initiatives or profit-sharing to benefit various causes. It is unclear, however, how prevalent (or, alternatively, extraordinary) these kinds of activities are. Although craft breweries have been studied as agents of landscape change previously, they remain understudied as sociocultural actors that advocate for particular issues or outcomes. Thus, to better understand the kinds of advocacy that breweries pursue, we conducted a qualitatively informed quantitative analysis (including qualitative coding, descriptive statistics, and two analytical visualization techniques) on a random sample of 400 craft breweries in the United States. The resulting typology of advocacy in craft brewing identifies three dozen distinct techniques and approximately two dozen themes of action across three broad axes of advocacy, clarifying how breweries engage in environmental, social (justice), and economic initiatives in both active and passive ways.
38-8655
human–environment interaction. offshore wind energy. Site selection. smulticriteria decision-making. sustainability.
Identifying offshore wind energy sites involves analyzing multiple variables, such as wind speed, proximity to the coastline, and sociocultural factors. This complex decision-making process often involves many stakeholders, resulting in conflicting data and goals. Decision analysis that promotes collaboration, transparency, understanding, and sustainability is key. This study presents a unique model of human–environment interaction that reconciles different perspectives and visualizes the balance between fisheries and wind power. Using three multicriteria decision models (weighted aggregated sum product assessment [WASPAS], technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution [TOPSIS], and analytical hierarchy process [AHP]), we analyze the decision mix for wind farm selection and assess the impacts on fisheries using historical data. Our approach was applied to an upwelling system in California, generating ten tailored decision scenarios for different stakeholder groups. The results showed that adaptation scores for specific call areas in northern California decreased when the weight of fishery factors increased, and there was a tendency for high-scoring areas to shift southward as fishery parameters increased. The results of the sensitivity analysis showed that the first-order sensitivity scores of WASPAS were better correlated with the weights compared to TOPSIS, whereas the second-order sensitivity scores were generally lower, indicating a reduced interdependence of our model.
33. Physical Elements of Planning
33-1 INFRASTRUCTURE/COMMUNITY FACILITIES
38-8656
Identity. island studies. islandness. Islands. narratives.
Islandness is a contested concept, not just between disciplines but also cultures, entangled with what islands, island studies, and island identity are understood to be. The purpose of this article is to explore some of these different meanings, without necessarily unifying or reconciling them, with the aim of keeping multiple understandings of islandness in creative tension. We begin by considering islandness as smallness, recognizing that though many entry points into island studies relate to size in some way, what constitutes small is dependent on both context and worldview. Next, we consider islandness as culture, and the concept of island identity, which is expressed in varied forms. Finally, we consider framings of islands as others, and the extent to which contemporary narratives linked to islands are really inherent to islands or not. Ultimately, we conclude that although there is much to be gained from appreciating differing understandings of islandness, these multiple meanings make it critical to reflect on context wherever the term is used, and exercise care in assigning attributes and outcomes to islandness.
38-8657
Celilo Falls. Columbia River. Indigenous geographies. reclamation. settler colonialism. U.S. West.
In 1957, the Dalles Dam was constructed on the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon. When the dam was completed, it inundated Celilo Falls, a Native American fishery and cultural gathering point that had been in use for at least 12,000 years. Prior to dam construction, the federal government and local agencies issued a number of reports stating the necessity of the dam for economic development through hydroelectric power generation, improved shipping navigation, flood control, and expanded irrigation capacity. These reports often sought to determine the financial payout that would be made to the groups with treaty rights to fish at their “usual and accustomed” places, such as Celilo Falls. However, the reports rarely engage with the cultural significance of Celilo Falls or the depth of opposition that people had to the dam. The research discussed here is based on archival government reports alongside the voices of affected tribal members preserved through The Confluence Project and other sources. This article develops the idea that reclamation infrastructure in the U.S. West plays a key role in colonizing efforts from federal to local scales, reflecting the aims of the settler state. Through an analysis of government documents alongside the recollections of Indigenous elders from the mid-Columbia region, this article offers insights into how reclamation infrastructure functions as an aspect of settler colonialism and relies on theorizations of this process from the people most affected by the loss of Celilo Falls.
38-8658
business climate. Fantus. location consulting. market-making. metric.
Interlocality competition is a staple concern of modern economic geography. Yet, beyond the abstract bases of this competition in the very nature of capitalism, the question of how such interlocality competition arose in the post-1945 period remains underexplored. In this article we draw on the sociology of markets and metrics literature to examine the socially constructed nature of the “location market” that underpins interlocality competition for investment. The empirical focus of the article is on one company—Fantus—and one idea—the local business climate. The Fantus company pioneered the practice of corporate site selection and location consulting and played a key role in constructing a market for location in the United States. Drawing on sources that include the archive of the company’s files, we describe the work of this company and its role in assembling the local “business climate” index. The story provides a glimpse of the politicized and contested origins of metrics as market-making techniques, their derivatives, and their unintended, unanticipated, and at times downright perverse effects. The business climate measure served to change perceptions of the value of places, rendering them as interchangeable locations. It is a compelling example of the broader process by which the representation of places in the language of numbers exacerbates the competition for capital, obscuring the politicized and asymmetrical nature of that competition.
38-8659
Human rights. Myanmar. Remote sensing. Rohingya. Watersheds.
The role of remote sensing (RS) in the investigation of major human rights violations has begun to significantly increase. Although geographers have focused on expanding the technical application of RS in documenting such horrors, there has been limited interest in exploring the complex ways RS is being used by international human rights (IHR) actors in the field. This article argues that the ongoing crisis in Rakhine State, Myanmar, has become a watershed moment for the IHR community as it begins to fully embrace the use of RS across multiple levels of intergovernmental and nongovernmental investigative processes. As such, the application of an inherently geographic process in the coconstruction of rights-based narratives regarding the Rohingya people needs to be explored in terms of how RS is understood by IHR actors, the ways in which it is being used, and the geopolitical impact it is having.
33-2 LAND USE/SITE PLANNING STANDARDS
38-8660
ecosystem service. functional process zones. Himalayan river system. physical river template. river networks. Riverine landscapes. social-ecological systems.
A foundational tenet of the ecosystem services concept is that they arise from biophysical processes. Riverine landscapes are process-response systems where river flow and geomorphology generate a heterogeneous physical template that influences ecological processes, suggesting that the supply of ecosystem services in riverine landscapes should be congruent with the character and heterogeneity of the physical template. In this study, we examine the congruency between the physical template (river functional process zones; FPZs) and the supply of river flow dependent ecosystem services from riverine landscapes of the Koshi River Basin, Nepal. The supply of ecosystem services was congruent with FPZs. Social factors were shown to mediate the use and value of ecosystem services between FPZs. Heterogeneity of the physical template interacts with place, social activity, and demography to influence the use and potential value of ecosystem services across the riverine landscape. These spatial patterns of greater use of some types of riverine ecosystem services in certain areas of the riverine landscape are indicative of a highly coupled agricultural or “green loop” social-ecological system (SES) and show that maintaining riverine template heterogeneity is an important element of this green loop SES that supports 40 million people in the Koshi River Basin.
38-8661
agriculture. breadfruit. Climate change. Florida. tropicalization.
Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) is a domesticated tree crop found throughout the insular Pacific and in other tropical regions of the world where it has been introduced, most notably in the Caribbean. Although breadfruit thrives in Hawai‘i, as it has since before European contact, efforts to introduce breadfruit to the mainland United States have been challenged by the tree’s intolerance for even mildly cold temperatures. Historically, only extreme southern Florida has been consistently warm enough to support breadfruit cultivation. Today, however, likely owing to warming temperatures associated with global climate change, but possibly also the selection of breadfruit varieties with improved cold tolerance, an increasing number of growers based throughout Florida are finding success cultivating breadfruit trees and producing fruit. Using a mixed-methods approach including interviews and surveys among forty-three Florida-based breadfruit growers, this article investigates the current status and geographical range of breadfruit in the mainland United States and considers both the sustainability implications and the remaining environmental challenges regarding its cultivation.
38-8662
geomorphology. global. landform. Maps. topography.
Prior to the current era of digital geomorphological mapping, global and regional-scale land surface characterization was advanced by qualitative interpretations that relied on human visualization aided by disciplinary knowledge of geophysical processes combined with extensive field study. In the early twentieth century, Fenneman proposed to devise systematic physiographic divisions of the United States and in 1916 produced what is still regarded as an authoritative map of these divisions. His physiographic regions were developed to provide context when describing land surface characteristics of smaller areas using well-known regional characteristics and descriptors. In 1968, geographer Richard E. Murphy published a large-format map of the “Landforms of the World” to fill a gap in the suite of standard classroom maps. In 1990, the British geomorphologist E. M. Bridges published World Geomorphology, providing the first global treatment and description of divisions, provinces, and sections—the same hierarchical land partitioning concepts that Fenneman used decades earlier. In the twenty-first century, geographic information systems (GIS) technologies are nearly ubiquitous, yet neither Murphy’s nor Bridges’s work existed as GIS data. To further illuminate their pioneering work, we (1) recompiled Murphy’s landforms as a spatial combination of modern existing data layers, and (2) used the recompiled Murphy’s landforms as a basis for the boundaries of the divisions, provinces, and sections described by Bridges. Our aggregation yields a new resource, Named Landforms of the World, version 2.0, which provides a reference-level, basemap-quality data layer that can significantly facilitate mapping, assessing, and understanding Earth surface features.
38-8663
agriculture. Du Bois’s concept. heat. labor. political ecology. racial capitalism.
This article synthesizes literatures on political ecology and racial capitalism to interrogate the historical development and contemporary conditions of extreme heat and farm labor in Georgia. Challenging the extent to which agriculture is considered “naturally” exceptional as an industry, I argue that ecological volatility has been discursively deployed to justify Georgia’s racialized, devalued agricultural labor regime. Drawing on Du Bois’s concept of “the shadow,” I link early settler anxieties about extreme heat, violent nature, and the ideal settler-subject to current demands for immigrant farm labor through the H-2A temporary agricultural guestworker program. Although the exceptional “nature” of agriculture is overstated, the biophysical realities of extreme heat pose embodied risks for farmworkers who are treated as disposable in a constructed labor system dependent on exposure and vulnerability.
38-8664
access. golf course. greenspace. Urban planning. White neighborhood.
Providing equitable access to greenspace requires innovative strategies in urban areas where land is scarce and expensive. One potential solution is to make golf courses, which are often exclusive and require daily or annual membership fees, more accessible to the general public. The impact of urban golf courses on greenspace access has yet to be investigated systematically, however. Here we quantify (1) the number and area of golf courses within all major urban areas in the conterminous United States, and (2) the number and demographics of people that would benefit from better access to them. We identify 6,962 urban golf courses that cover 3,102?km2 urban land, equivalent to ~29 percent of all urban greenspace. We find that 3.4 percent of the U.S. urban population (equivalent to nearly 6 million people) live less than 1?km from a golf course but more than 1?km from public greenspace. Policies that make golf courses more available to the general public would substantially improve greenspace access, and associated health benefits, for millions of Americans. In most cities, however, it is wealthy, White neighborhoods that would benefit most from better access to golf courses, not the lower socioeconomic, ethno-racial minority communities that are most lacking in greenspace access. Making golf courses more accessible to the general public should therefore be considered just one component of a more diverse set of strategies to improve access to greenspace in U.S. cities.
38-8665
CA–Markov. IDRISI software. sensitivity analysis. validation. verification.
Numerous models exist for users to simulate land change to communicate with an audience concerning future land change. This article raises four fundamental questions to help model users decide whether to use any model: (1) Can the user understand the model? (2) Can the audience understand the model? (3) Can the user control the model? (4) Does the model address the goals of the specific application? This article applies these questions to the popular cellular automata–Markov (CA–Markov) model as IDRISI’s CA–Markov module expresses. Sensitivity analysis examines 120 ways to set the module’s parameters. Verification compares the module’s behavior to the software’s documentation. Results show that the cellular automata’s allocation fails to follow the quantity of change that the Markov module computes. The module’s behavior is likely to cause users to misinterpret the validation metrics and to miscommunicate with audiences. Thus, the answers to the four questions were not satisfactory for this article’s case study. This article’s framework helps users to judge a model’s appropriateness for a specific application by combining sensitivity analysis with verification in a manner that helps to interpret validation. Users should answer the four questions as they decide whether to use any software’s modules.
38-8666
cluster analysis. disability. Environmental justice. GAM. generalized additive model. green space access.
This article presents new quantitative results on the distribution of residential green space for people with disabilities in the United States, building on and bridging scholarly research in two distinct domains: one involving approaches that quantify disparities in green space access among racialized minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and the other using qualitative methods that demonstrate that most green spaces remain inaccessible and unwelcoming to disabled visitors. Using generalized additive models (GAMs) that controlled for demographic factors and climatological characteristics, we find that residential areas with more green space generally have a higher proportion of disabled residents. The statistical results run counter to expectations from the literature, thus complicating the prevailing narrative and indicating a need for mixed-methods research to examine multiple dimensions of access and environmental justice. Using cluster analysis to assess spatial trends, we detect residential clusters of high disability and low green space and find that they are located in predominantly non-White, urban, and more socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods compared to clusters of high disability and high green space. Cluster analysis results suggest that there are inequities in green space access at the intersection of disability, race, and class, as well as across the urban–rural continuum.
33-4 GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS
38-8667
Huff model. national retail system. retail center. SafeGraph. Typology.
Retail is an important function at the core of urban areas, occupying a key role in determining their economic prosperity, desirability, and vibrancy. Efforts to understand the geographies of retail centers, the cores of retailing in urban areas, have a long academic tradition, often studied through either rich local case studies, or when geographically more expansive, are constrained by limited detail. New data in United States detailing the location and uses of retail creates a significant opportunity to develop a more complete and comprehensive overview of the national retail system, at a high spatial resolution. This research is rooted in a pragmatic effort to provide the first and most comprehensive model of U.S. retail center geographies, through development of an integrated, conceptual, and empirically grounded framework, using data from SafeGraph, to examine where they are located, what characteristics they have, and who uses them. The resulting geographies are of great interest, creating significant potential in the monitoring of the national retail system as it continues to evolve in response to wider structural challenges. Furthermore, by integrating these three geographies (where, what, and who), we establish a conceptual framework that yields substantive insights about the relationships between each of them, and argues that understandings of U.S. retail center geographies are more comprehensive and useful when considering the who, what, and where together.
38-8668
behavioral context. intrinsic context. MGWR. place-based geography. Scales. spatial modeling frameworks.
The issue of whether place significantly affects spatial behavior has long created both a philosophical and an operational schism within geography. Here we show how these schisms can be bridged by identifying how place and behavior can be linked through recognizing and incorporating what we term intrinsic and behavioral contextual effects into models of spatial behavior. We argue that spatial modeling frameworks that attempt to relate spatial behavior to aspects of people and places might be seriously misspecified if they do not incorporate both types of contextual effects. We compare three popular statistical modeling frameworks that encompass placed-based contextual effects: spatial error models, multilevel models, and multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR). Based on Monte Carlo simulation and empirical analysis, we demonstrate the reassuring similarity of the results from the three frameworks but also the superiority of MGWR. The inclusion of essentially unmeasurable effects within a nomothetic framework provides an important bridge between two previously distinct philosophies within geography and acts as a binding force within the discipline.
38-8669
eigenvector. geographic visualization. painting. spatial autocorrelation. spatial weights matrix.
Do any of the known synergies existing between either geography and art or mathematics and art bridge all three of these disciplines? The geo-humanities and the math-humanities literatures describe only these two individual synergies. A new quantitative geography methodology exploits a sophisticated mathematical concept to analyze remotely sensed satellite images, which, when extended to artistic paintings, indeed spans all three disciplines. The organizing concept is spatial autocorrelation, or the tendency for dis/similar colors and their intensities to cluster in paintings. This article summarizes demonstrations of this contention, with specific applications to da Vinci, Monet, and Rembrandt paintings. Its principal contribution is that, for high geographic resolution digital versions of paintings, a replication constructed with judiciously selected and combined spatial autocorrelation components remarkably closely corresponds with a digital copy of its original source, further generalizing certain recent findings reported in the literature.
38-8670
academic majors. discipline. Geography. Institutions. programs.
This presidential address focuses on how community intertwines with geography. On one hand, geography is the discipline that studies the community as it exists in place. Geography itself is a community—an intellectual, social, and cultural community—that must be supported and expanded. Geography’s strength has been in upholding this community. Today, the discipline of geography suffers from some real challenges. The number of majors has recently declined, and more programs have closed than have opened in recent years. Improving our geographic community can be accomplished through four efforts. First, we need to improve our institutional diversity. Second, we must increase our workforce diversity. Third, we need to attend to expanding our discipline to first-generation students. Finally, we must harness the growth of Advanced Placement Human Geography to improve the status of geography in higher education. These and other efforts will go a long way in expanding the community of geography and in reinvigorating geography as a discipline.
38-8671
digitally transformed daily activities. information and communication technology (ICT). mediated togetherness. pockets of mediated order. time geography.
In contrast to the dichotomous distinction between offline and online activity in much previous research, we argue for hybridization as a key feature of the digitalized postpandemic society, shaping and constraining the everyday lives and activities of individuals in new, unforeseen ways. The current understanding of the complex ways in which hybridization plays out and reorders everyday life is limited, partly due to a lack of relevant conceptualizations and methodological tools. The aim of this article is to further develop the time-geographic approach, as theory and method, to understand and visualize the hybridization of everyday activities. The article contributes to previous literature on everyday life digitalization in several important respects. The notions of hybrid activities, grounds, and sequences are proposed for an enhanced theoretical understanding of hybridization. Moreover, we argue that interrelated hybrid constraints shape the spatiotemporal organization of everyday activities. The concept of pocket of mediated order is proposed as a new domain of everyday activities in the hybrid era, supporting the accomplishment of everyday projects, yet also transforming the local pockets of order. Finally, drawing on a real family case, we refine the time-geographical notation system to capture and visualize the full complexity of hybridization in the time–space setting of daily life.
38-8672
daily activity participation. geographical contextual effects. Multilevel models. space-time model. subjective well-being.
Understanding how geographical environments influence peoples’ subjective experiences of daily activities is of great potential for improving subjective well-being (SWB), a subject that is presently limited by a lack of available data and proper statistical methods. Focusing on Beijing and using a unique data set that linked residents’ seven-day mobility trajectories at a fine spatiotemporal resolution to their complete activity participation and momentary well-being, this article investigates the temporal dynamics of and geographical contextual effects on SWB of daily activities. We developed a unified spatial multilevel stochastic process model to simultaneously capture periodicity, stochastic dynamics, and individual heterogeneity effects. Results show that momentary SWB has a twenty-four-hour periodicity and evolves stochastically around individual equilibrium states depending on key life-circumstance variables. Migrants and low-income residents tend to have lower equilibrium states than their counterparts. Real-time air pollution exposure significantly lowers daily activity satisfaction levels, and an inverted-U-shaped relationship exists between city vibrancy and satisfaction.
38-8673
Derwent Whittlesey. Edward Ackerman. Harvard University. history of geography. Human geography.
This article documents the rise and fall of geography at Harvard University, from the earliest instruction in the seventeenth century to its demise in the mid-twentieth century. Analysis of recently released data from university archives enables deeper understandings than previously written in existing literature, including a focus on the roles of key figures central to the decision to end geography and the prolonged struggle to sustain geography at the college. The article refutes unfounded claims made by key figures to end geography and aims to tell a more nuanced, empirically detailed, queer account of this history. Of central importance to this account is the work of Harvard geography professor Derwent Whittlesey. By providing this more nuanced account, we endeavor to address what a 1951 report at the college identified as the “unfinished business” of geography at Harvard. We discuss an erasure that has long haunted both the discipline of geography and the campus by arguing that the feminization of geographical knowledge and the homophobic feminization of queer geographers at Harvard proved central to the suppression of geographical education and closure of the geography program.
38-8674
coefficient optimization. Geographically weighted regression. MBIC. splicing algorithm. ten-norm. variable selection.
A geographically weighted regression (GWR) model with fewer explanatory variables and higher prediction accuracy is required in spatial analysis and other practical applications. This article proposes an l0-norm variable adaptive selection method to enhance performances of a GWR by simultaneously performing model selection and coefficient optimization. Specifically, we formulate a regularized GWR model with an additional l0-norm constraint to shrink those unimportant regression coefficients toward zero and propose an adaptive variable selection algorithm by iteratively distinguishing the important variables from the variable set. At each location, the best variable subset and optimizing coefficient estimations are simultaneously achieved under the l0-GWR framework. Moreover, two novel criteria, the modified Bayesian information criterion and the interpretability of coefficient symbol, which specify the variable selection and model interpretation, respectively, are also introduced to improve the performance of the l0-GWR. Experiments on both simulated and actual data sets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the estimation accuracy of coefficients and can also enhance the interpretative ability of the established model.
38-8675
archival reconstruction. climate indication. DSAS GIS application. surge-type glacier. Svalbard.
Surge-type glaciers in Svalbard are common and have been studied extensively. Whereas active phases of surges were observed and thoroughly investigated recently, data on surges in the past are limited. They are essential, however, to assess the duration of the surge cycle, to determine relation to climatic impulses, and to better understand triggering factors and the mechanism of this phenomenon. Three glaciers located in Recherchefjorden, NW Wedel Jarlsberg Land (Svalbard) were studied because they undergo the same regional climate conditions but differ by the basin’s size and morphology front types. The article employed different types of data, including geomorphological records, cartographic, graphic, and bibliographic sources. These sources permitted the determination of the location of the termini of glaciers and the quantitative and qualitative description of the rate of changes determined with computer analysis and statistical compilation. Such analysis of other data sources enabled the reconstruction of glaciers’ behavior in the past. Glacier surges in the study area correspond with this type of phenomenon in Svalbard. The results obtained showed a certain synchronization of surges in the 1820s and 1830s, the 1880s, the first half of the twentieth century, and particularly the last decade.
38-8676
average-based estimation method. bootstrapping. Geographically and temporally weighted regression. residual sum of squares. spatiotemporal nonstationarity.
Geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) models have been widely used to explore spatiotemporal nonstationarity where all the regression coefficients are assumed to be varying over both space and time. In reality, however, constant, only temporally varying, and only spatially varying coefficients might also be possible depending on the underlying effects of the explanatory variables on the response variable. Therefore, the development of inference and estimation methods for such special types of the coefficients is essential to the deep understanding of spatiotemporal characteristics of the regression relationship. In this article, an average-based approach, relying on a modified estimation of the conventional GTWR models, is proposed to calibrate the GTWR models with the special types of the coefficients, on which a statistical test is formulated to simultaneously infer constant, temporally varying, and spatially varying coefficients. The simulation study shows that the test method is of valid Type I error and satisfactory power and the average-based estimation method yields more accurate estimators for the special types of the coefficients. A real-life example based on Beijing house prices is given to demonstrate the applicability of the test and estimation methods as well as the extensibility of the test in model selection.
34. Transportation and Communication
34-1 TRANSPORTATION POLICY
38-8677
Black geographies. frameworks . South African studies. transport geography. urban studies.
This article contributes to the burgeoning dialogue in Black geographies by adding a focus on transport. Because there is no singular, all-encompassing framework for Black geographies, this article draws on a long history of Blackness and Whiteness in the discipline of geography and beyond. It contextualizes the contemporary conversation within critical reflections from feminist, indigenous, and queer as well as decolonial and postcolonial studies. These wider considerations are especially important for geography, a discipline historically detached from efforts to deracialize the city. The article then refines its focus on Blackness and transport by reflecting on race and mobility in South African cities. The empirical focus for these deliberations is Johannesburg, where transport has historically been used as a tool for discrimination and control, and in the postapartheid context, transport provides unbridled opportunities for social and spatial integration. Three frameworks for exploring Black transport geographies are then introduced: the policies and laws that control movement, community action and protest against racist transport, and the emergence of informal transport systems. The aim of this article, however, is not to promote a particular approach for bringing transport into conversation with Black geographies, but rather to provide a rigorous reflection that is not only analytically productive but practically useful.
34-2 TRANSPORTATION MODELING
38-8678
active transportation. hard and soft spatial constraints. physically and psychologically accessible space. Public transit. smartphone-based mobility survey. space–time prism.
Travelers’ day-to-day mobility depends on their perceptions, experiences, and personal characteristics. Many accessibility measures overlook perceptual factors and mainly consider space–time limitations of mobility, overestimating travelers’ potential mobility. We introduce a novel inclusive accessibility concept that advances time-geographic accessibility measures in light of travel behavior theories. We conceptualize inclusive accessibility as a subset of the classic space–time prism (STP) that incorporates hard constraints (e.g., limited infrastructure and services and time) and soft constraints (e.g., perceptions of safety and comfort toward the built environment and infrastructure and travel time preferences). We collected survey data on individual-level mobility perceptions and applied machine learning algorithms to predict personalized soft constraints for walking. Considering public transit and walking, we model and compare three network-based STPs: classic STP with hard constraints, inclusive STP with soft spatial constraints, and inclusive STP with soft spatial and temporal constraints. Our method demonstrates heterogeneities in individuals’ mobility perceptions. We illustrate that the individual’s level of accessibility shrinks substantially as we approach more conservative measures that include travel perceptions. Our method highlights the differences between travelers’ physically and psychologically accessible space depending on their travel choices and exposure.
34-5 AUTOMOBILES/HIGHWAY/TRAFFIC ENGINEERING
38-8679
chrononormativity. decision-making. intentional automobility. multiplicity of durations. non-Western experience.
This article responds to the uncritical use of chronological time and the strict division between past, present, and future when thinking about mobility behavior or mobility decisions. On the basis of this critique, it introduces the concept of intentional automobility, which relies on the Bergsonian–Deleuzian conception of time—duration (la durée). It shows that transport-mode decisions are not only made in the present, separated from the past and the future, but that the past and the future are part of every such decision. Using the example of the metropolitan area of Brno, Czech Republic, a postsocialist space, we show how differently socialist and postsocialist societies can be temporally normalized. At the same time, contemporary postsocialist mobility decisions are still influenced by socialist time norms—chrononormatives. Our main research question is how everyday mobility decisions between the car and public transport are influenced by the temporal norms of the society. To answer this question, we have employed a mixed methods research design that has been divided into a quantitative analysis of mode choice for individual trips and a qualitative analysis of statements about mode choice. Key findings include the relationship between transport-mode preference and a particular chrononormative. We identify four contexts—time, routing, alcohol, and everyday activity planning—in which the chrononormatives associated with the car and public transport are substitutable. It is on this basis that we introduce intentional automobility.
35. Architecture and Urban Design
35-3 VISUAL FORM
38-8680
Aesthetics. creative methods. frames. South Asia. Urban environments.
Urban environmental aesthetics form a cornerstone in neoliberal development discourse in Mumbai, India. Formulated primarily on visual metrics, such as those of green lawns and modern architecture, these aesthetic sensibilities set up the horizon of what is seeable and sayable, serving to legitimize planning schemes while obscuring their social and environmental harms. This is evident in the city’s elite Hiranandani Gardens township, a project heavily contested on legal, humanistic, and environmental grounds. Beginning from “waste,” or spaces and perspectives that lack value in dominant discourses, I analyze how the production of developmentalist “value” relies on environmental aesthetics as well as the limits of such formulations. By way of three frames—empty buildings, an abandoned quarry, and remembered wilderness—I illustrate power structures that facilitate the conversion of waste into value, the contradictions and limits in dominant sustainability discourses, and the messy terrain of contestations that they face. The article contributes to critical development scholarship by emphasizing the significance of aesthetics in unveiling power relations entrained in the making of urban landscapes. I also extend creative engagements in geography by incorporating sensory engagements beyond the visual to interrupt dominant aesthetic sensibilities and open critical and creative ways of knowing urban nature.
35-7 ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL SYSTEMS
38-8681
Environmental nongovernmental organizations. financialisation. nature conservation. neoliberal environmental governance. nongovernment protected area.
This article examines the political consequences of environmental nongovernment organization (ENGO) involvement in protected area conservation in Australia. Rapid growth of a nongovernment protected area (NGPA) estate this century has involved a range of individuals, communities, First Nations, and ENGOs, and has been closely tied to government policy and private finance. Although NGPA conservation achievements have been profound, there has been limited examination of what expanded nongovernment involvement, responsibility, and leadership mean for the practice and governance of nature conservation. Thematic analysis of twenty-four?key informant interviews and selective gray literature identifies how financing, accountability, and partisan politics are emerging as key domains in shaping an NGPA estate that reflects a closer alignment with capital and market forces. ENGOs are playing a key role in crafting new political conditions for protected area conservation, where their role in neoliberal governance is not just service delivery, but statecraft and agenda setting. ENGOs are increasingly casting protected area conservation as apolitical, and thereby a bipartisan activity, driven by a “pragmatic” agenda that seeks to secure private financing for land ownership and management obligations. Frameworks of accountability to donors shape ENGO practices and conceptions of conservation through exposure to novel market mechanisms. As a result, ENGO operation permits limited space for plural, ideological, and structural debate about protected area conservation, the public interest, and the root causes of ecological crises to which it responds. The embrace of conservation led by nongovernment actors marks a substantive shift from the formative politics of ENGOs in Australia.
38-8682
Environmental assessment. Indigenous geographies. Indigenous water rights. Legal geography. Piikani . settler colonialism.
This article discusses the Piikani Nation’s attempts to challenge the Oldman River Dam, as this struggle highlights the challenges Indigenous communities can face in attempting to articulate water and land relationships through the languages and structures of settler colonial law. Completed in 1991, the dam faced multiple forms of opposition by Piikani members, including lawsuits and an attempt by community activists representing the Lonefighters Society to divert the river around an existing irrigation weir. For this article, I focus on how Piikani Nation members attempted to assert their geographic relationships with the Oldman River through participation in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Review process. Within this process, Piikani elders, activists, and community advocates mobilized various conceptions of law, such as treaty rights and Piikani and Blackfoot legal traditions. This article therefore seeks to answer this question: How do Indigenous forms of jurisdiction articulate with Canadian legal and regulatory fora, such as the Environmental Assessment Review process? To answer these questions, I draw from both critical political economy and Indigenous geographies, as I argue that in struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Specifically, I use the concept of articulation from Marxian political economy, suggesting this theory, in conversation with legal pluralism scholarship, provides a generative framework for critically interrogating how Indigenous legal orders interact with Canadian law.
36. Environmenal Psychology/Environment, Behavior, and Society
36-3 ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDE/AWARENESS/VALUES
38-8683
chlorophyll-a. Ekman mass transport. IOD. Niño3.4. southwest monsoon. wavelet transform.
The chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentration, an indicator of biomass that is a conduit for fixation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, is analyzed using Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative (OC-CCI) 4-km eight-day resolution data along the west coast of India. A peak of Chl-a blooms during the southwest monsoon (SWM) along the west coast of India and during northeast monsoon (NEM) in northern regions is observed. The blooms start as early as the end of April in southern regions and spread northward. The Fourier transformation and wavelet analysis explicitly reveals the annual and seasonal variability of these blooms and aids in grouping the regions into three zones. The blooms are strong in the southern regions and occur during SWM, whereas in the northern regions, they occur during SWM as well as NEM. The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and Niño3.4 is negatively correlated with Chl-a concentration in southern regions only during a few months. Similarly, only for a few months do the northern regions show negative correlations between Niño3.4 and Chl-a concentration. The Chl-a blooms are positively correlated with concurrent Ekman mass transport and precipitation and with a lag of four to seven steps of eight-day cycles in southern regions, whereas the northern regions are positively correlated with concurrent precipitation only. The time of onset and end of blooms and the time span for their northward spread during SWM and southward spread during NEM vary from year to year. The different onset and end times of blooms and varying periods of blooms are vital for policy decisions on regulating fishing activity and establishing a ban period along the west coast of India for sustainable utilization of fishery resources.
38-8684
actionable science. Anthropocene. Climate adaptation. coproduction. critical physical geography. research ethics. stakeholder engagement.
To help stakeholders such as planners, resource managers, policymakers, and decision makers address environmental challenges in the Anthropocene, scientists are increasingly creating actionable science—science that is useful, usable, and used. Critical physical geography encourages the engagement of stakeholders in the creation of scientific knowledge to conduct actionable science and produce outputs that are directly relevant to stakeholder plans, decisions, or actions. Many scientists, however, lack formal training in how to partner with stakeholders using effective and ethical practices. In this article, we use the core principles for ethical research of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice from the Belmont Report (1979) as a suggested framework to examine the perspectives of stakeholders engaged in climate adaptation science projects. We argue that this framework aligns with the principles of critical physical geography and provides guidance for scientists to make their research more actionable while placing necessary emphasis on ethical considerations. We also challenge scientists to consider the broader ethical implications of engaging with these partners.
38-8685
affective atmospheres of aeromobility. friction. geographies of social movements. Hong Kong. immobilities. mobility politics. Protests.
Protest immobilities have political potential because of the affective atmospheres they produce. In 2019, the Hong Kong protest movement targeted Hong Kong International Airport in a series of sit-ins resulting in a two-day shutdown and cancellation of more than 1,000 flights. This article is based on participant observation and interviews with thirty-two people—aviation workers, tourists, expatriates, and demonstrators—who were present at one or more of the sit-ins, and it uses a perspective informed by work on affective atmospheres and social movements in geography. We demonstrate the political potential of four forms of embodied mobility– arrival, friction, waiting, and departing from the airport on foot. Arriving to unexpected scenes produced micropolitical change among passengers, as the fatigue of air travel heightened the emotional impact of the sit-ins. Frictions were politically generative because they forced passengers to slow down and notice the assembly. Waiting produced solidarities between different factions of the protest movement and generated animosity from previously apathetic passengers who were stuck. Walking was an anxious ordeal for those forced to depart the airport on foot after public transport was suspended. The article shows how demonstrators can resist, alter, and transmit affective atmospheres through the grounding of aeromobilities.
38-8686
Environmental justice. geographic thought. nature. political ecology. Race. white supremacy.
What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? In this introduction to the 2023 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers—focused on Race, Nature, and the Environment—we reflect on the meaning and practice of unsettling in a time of climate crisis, toxic legacies, uneven development, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that shape—and are shaped by—the (re)production of nature. We note the ascendancy of critical scholarship on race and racialization in Anglo-American geography; its uneven diffusion and unmet challenges; and the unstoppable force of insurgent thinking, abolition geography, critical race theory, Black and Indigenous geographies, scholar activism, and environmental justice praxis in taking hold and transforming the discipline. The sixteen articles in this special issue embody different ways to “unsettle” disciplinary thought across the vibrant fields of political ecology and human–environment geography. We discuss how the articles collectively grapple with timely questions of land, water, territory, and place-making; render visible the spatial and socioecological reproduction of power and violence by capital and the state; and make space for the enduring politics of struggle on multiple registers—body, home, classroom, park, city, community, region, and world.
38-8687
Anthropocene. discipline. geosciences otherwise. human exceptionalism. pedagogy of unbecoming. white supremacy.
White supremacy and human exceptionalism are the epistemological and political foundations of contemporary geosciences. Disciplinary norms and ways of being call forth the geoscientist as “man of reason.” How do we, as educators, invite students to analyze and act on the interconnected political ecological challenges of the current environmental crisis without reinforcing the man of reason, now refashioned as the reformed and greener “ecosystem man-ager”? What do we need to unlearn, to unbecome? Where and how can we do this unlearning and unbecoming? This article positions pedagogy as a site of disciplinary and institutional transformation. We outline an antiracist, anticolonial pedagogical framework—what we call a pedagogy of unbecoming—that nurtures an extrarational, embodied, and relational geosciences otherwise. We share our experience, as white settler educators in persistently white disciplines, of enacting this pedagogy of unbecoming and outline specific protocols we used in course design. In the end, our efforts to transform the look and feel of geographic knowing are pragmatic attempts to walk alongside endeavors led by marginalized communities—inside and outside of academia—to build worlds otherwise. We invite peers to join in an ongoing process of unbecoming to build the ontological and epistemological conditions necessary for mutual flourishing.
38-8688
bibliometrics . COVID-19 pandemic. geography. machine learning. research themes. review.
The rampant COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe rapidly in 2020, causing a tremendous impact on human health and the global economy. This pandemic has stimulated an explosive increase of related studies in various disciplines, including geography, which has contributed to pandemic mitigation with a unique spatiotemporal perspective. Reviewing relevant research has implications for understanding the contribution of geography to COVID-19 research. The sheer volume of publications, however, makes the review work more challenging. Here we use the support vector machine and term frequency-inverse document frequency algorithm to identify geographical studies and bibliometrics to discover primary research themes, accelerating the systematic review of COVID-19 geographical research. We confirmed 1,171 geographical papers about COVID-19 published from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021, of which a large proportion are in the areas of geographic information systems (GIS) and human geography. We identified four main research themes—the spread of the pandemic, social management, public behavior, and impacts of the pandemic—embodying the contribution of geography. Our findings show the feasibility of machine learning methods in reviewing large-scale literature and highlight the value of geography in the fight against COVID-19. This review could provide references for decision makers to formulate policies combined with spatial thinking and for scholars to find future research directions in which they can strengthen collaboration with geographers.
36-4 SOCIO-SPATIAL FACTORS
38-8689
geoforensics. GOFIND+. pollen. single-site joint. spatial optimization.
Geoforensic science investigates the location and time of criminal occurrences by integrating multiple fields, including geography, criminology, ecology, biology, and geology. The ubiquity, durability, and spatial-temporal predictability make pollen a frequently used biomarker in geoforensic investigations to help determine the provenance of hard-to-trace items, including computers, counterfeit products, digging equipment, clothing, and undetonated explosives. The recently developed Geoforensic Interdiction (GOFIND) model links the pollen combination collected from a sample object with the probability of locations traversed by the object. Although the GOFIND model improves over the traditional single-site joint probability approach and can be used to identify multiple locations simultaneously, substantial limitations remain. In particular, GOFIND requires specifying the number of locations traversed by an object in advance—a priori knowledge that is almost impossible to obtain in real-world applications. This article aims to introduce the GOFIND?+?model that leverages detected and undetected pollen to establish a probabilistic relation between pollen and the corresponding species distribution in the environment. Our simulation tests using the USDA CropScape data for the state of Texas show that the GOFIND?+?model outperforms the GOFIND model in predictive accuracy. Further, GOFIND?+?does not require that users specify the number of geographical stops and sites a priori.
38-8690
everyday activities. Mental health. path analysis. Shanghai. time geography.
Everyday activities in space and time have received much research attention in recent years. Geographers are interested in not only the spatial and temporal patterns of people’s everyday activities, but also the implications of such activities for social inequality and health outcomes. This study investigates how individuals’ weekday and weekend mobility and activities are associated with mental health. We argue that everyday activities play an important role in mental health because of the cognitive and affective processes associated with, not to mention the spatiotemporal exposure incurred by, conducting these activities. Data were collected in 2018 from 1,985 respondents living in thirty neighborhoods of Shanghai, China. Path analysis models are developed to establish links between daily activities and mental health, controlling for sociodemographics and residential location. Results show that mental health differs significantly among people not only of different sociodemographic groups, but also with different daily activity patterns. Weekday and weekend activities are found to have different influences on mental health. This research extends the existing literature on mental health by considering the mental health impacts of individuals’ daily activities and travel. The research findings are relevant for developing spatial policy interventions to promote mental health.
36-5 LIFESTYLE
38-8691
diet. dinner project. food behavior. food environment. household labor division. time geography.
Geographers and health researchers routinely analyze data on food-related behaviors to understand potential relationships between the food environment and diet. Analytical uncertainties arise, however, from discounting the sequential connections and household coordination of various food tasks. This study employed the time-geographic construct of the project, which is defined as a series of goal-oriented activities conducted by one or more individuals, to understand the composition and influencing factors of household food provision. To demonstrate the usefulness of the project concept, this study delineated how food activities were woven into a select couple’s daily life paths with the aid of sequence visualizations, and developed an analytical test case using time-use diaries of coupled adults living in Toronto, Canada. Ten dinner project archetypes were identified with distinct characteristics of activity composition and coordination. The study further explored how the dinner project archetypes were related to geographic food environments and meal consumption. By employing the project concept in research on food environments, the interconnectedness between various diet-related activities and diverse patterns of coordination between household members can be captured. Finally, a discussion on how the project perspective can improve the understanding of food environments and healthy eating was presented.
36-6 QUALITY OF LIFE
38-8692
Chance-based mechanisms. children and youth. digital geographies. gambling. gaming. popular culture.
Developing current geographical debates on children’s digital geographies and popular culture, this article examines children and young people’s experiences and understandings of gambling-style systems in digital games. Chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes are a growing feature of the global gaming industry. This article examines the space between gaming and gambling and provides new perspectives to this emerging field, drawing on empirical research from video ethnography game-play sessions with children and young people. This article uniquely foregrounds these accounts, giving room for their voices in a debate dominated by adults. We argue gambling-style systems must be understood within children’s everyday sociospatial experiences, including friendship, family, and curating collections. We provide a fuller picture of children and young people’s situatedness and negotiations around digital gaming through interviews with parents and game designers. We demonstrate the conceptually striking ways they narrate generational change, mobilizing powerful social constructions of childhood. We advance understandings of children’s popular culture and nostalgia in academic debates on digital childhoods, arguing that loot boxes are a new and important lens through which to view wider anxieties. Furthermore, we reveal potential risks associated with these systems and offer recommendations for a timely international policy debate.