CiteULike: Tag geography

Rural Windfall or a New Resource Curse? Coca, Income, and Civil Conflict in Colombia

Joshua Angrist — 2007-09-03T22:51:38-00:00

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series (March 2005), 11219.

Author contact info: Joshua Angrist Department of Economics MIT, E52-353 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-8909 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: angrist@mit.edu Adriana D. Kugler University of Houston Department of Economics 204 McElhinney Hall Houston, TX 77204-5019 Tel: 713/743-3832 Fax: 713/743-3798 E-Mail: adkugler@uh.edu Natural and agricultural resources for which there is a substantial black market, such as coca, opium, and diamonds, appear especially likely to be exploited by the parties to a civil conflict. On the other hand, these resources may also provide one of the few reliable sources of income in the countryside. In this paper, we study the economic and social consequences of a major shift in the production of coca paste from Peru and Bolivia to Colombia, where most coca leaf is now harvested. This shift, which arose in response to the disruption of the "air bridge" that previously ferried coca paste into Colombia, provided an exogenous boost in the demand for Colombian coca leaf. Our analysis shows this shift generated economic gains in rural areas, primarily in the form of increased self-employment earnings and increased labor supply by teenage boys. There is little evidence of widespread economic spillovers, however. The results also suggest that the rural areas which saw accelerated coca production subsequently became much more violent. Taken together, these findings support the view that the Colombian civil conflict is fueled by the financial opportunities that coca provides. This is in line with a recent literature which attributes the extension of civil conflicts to economic rewards and an environment that favors insurgency more than to the persistence of economic or political grievances.

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience

Yi-Fu Tuan — 2005-08-08T05:45:17-00:00

(08 February 2001)

Geography On the 25th anniversary of its publication, a new edition of this foundational work on human geography. In the twenty years since its original publication, Space and Place has not only established the discipline of human geography, but it has proven influential in such diverse fields as theatre, literature, anthropology, psychology, and theology. Eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighborhood, and nation, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time. He suggests that place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. Whether he is considering sacred versus "biased" space, mythical space and place, time in experiential space, or cultural attachments to space, Tuan's analysis is thoughtful and insightful throughout. Until retiring in 1998, Yi-Fu Tuan was a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is ranked among the country's most distinguished cultural geographers and has earned numerous honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bracken Award for landscape architecture, and an award for meritorious contribution to geography from the Association of American Geographers. He was recently named the Lauréat d'Honneur 2000 of the International Geographers Union. He is the author of many essays and books, including Escapism (1998) and Cosmos and Hearth (Minnesota, 1999).

Geography and genography: Prediction of continental origin using randomly selected single nucleotide polymorphisms

Dominic Allocco — 2007-03-13T04:01:18-00:00

BMC Genomics, Vol. 8 (10 March 2007), 68.

Neo-Liberalism as Creative Destruction

Harvey — 2006-06-01T23:12:15-00:00

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 88, No. 2. (June 2006), pp. 145-158.

Children in the Driver's Seat

Lolichen — 2006-12-12T23:35:29-00:00

Children's Geographies, Vol. 4, No. 3. (December 2006), pp. 347-357.

Methods for Fine Registration of Cadastre Graphs to Images

Roger Trias-Sanz — 2007-09-19T07:34:12-00:00

Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, Vol. 29, No. 11. (2007), pp. 1990-2000.

We propose two algorithms to match edges in a geometrically-imprecise graph to geometrically-precise strong boundaries in an image, where the graph is meant to give an a priori partition of the image into objects. This can be used to partition an image into objects described by imprecise external data, and thus to simplify the segmentation problem. We apply them to the problem of registering cadastre data to georeferenced aerial images, thus correcting the lack of geometrical detail of the cadastre data, and the fact that cadastre data gives information of a different nature than that found in images -- fiscal information as opposed to actual land use.

Review: The World's Hunger

2006-02-04T21:30:38-00:00

New strategies for learning geography: a tool for teachers' professional development in England and The Netherlands

David Leat — 2008-07-15T23:12:09-00:00

European Journal of Teacher Education, pp. 327-342.

Following a constructivist view on learning and based on the work of Adey and Shayer a group of teachers and lecturers in geographical education from north-east England developed some successful strategies to stimulate pupils' thinking skills. At the start of this century the ideas reached The Netherlands. This article presents the results of a survey among Dutch geography teachers who participated in an in-service training about thinking skills strategies for geography. Did these teachers really use the strategies in their classrooms after the in-service training? What kind of impact had it on their opinions about the usability of the strategies, their beliefs about students' learning and about their own teaching? This study shows that, in line with experiences in England, most Dutch geography teachers appreciate the thinking skills strategies as a good way to stimulate students' and their own learning. Animés d'une vision constructiviste de l'enseignement et de l'apprentissage, et sur la base des travaux d'Adey et Shayer, un groupe d'enseignants et de chargés de cours du Nord-Est de l'Angleterre dont la discipline est la géographie ont mis au point plusieurs stratégies efficaces pour stimuler les aptitudes de réflexion des élèves. Au début des années 2000, leurs théories sont parvenues jusqu'aux Pays-Bas. Le présent article présente les résultats d'une étude menée auprès de professeurs de géographie néerlandais qui ont suivi une formation ‘in-service' sur les stratégies de développement des aptitudes de réflexion pour la géographie. Les professeurs ont-ils réellement utilisés les stratégies dans leurs classes à l'issue de la formation? Quel type d'impact cette dernière a-t-elle eu sur leur opinion quant à l'utilité des stratégies? Cette étude révèle que la plupart des professeurs de géographie apprécient les stratégies de développement des aptitudes de réflexion et qu'elles constituent un bon moyen de stimuler les élèves et leur apprentissage de cette discipline. Siguiendo un punto de vista constructivista del aprendizaje y basándose en la obra de Adey y Shayer, un grupo de maestros y profesores de educación geográfica del noreste de Inglaterra desarrolló con éxito algunas estrategias para estimular las habilidades de pensamiento de los alumnos. A principios de este siglo, estas ideas llegaron a los Países Bajos. El presente artículo ofrece los resultados de un estudio realizado entre profesores de geografía holandeses que participaron en un curso de formación durante el trabajo sobre estrategias para estimular las habilidades de pensamiento para la geografía. ¿Utilizaron estos profesores realmente las estrategias en sus clases una vez finalizada la formación? ¿Cómo influyó ésta en sus opiniones sobre la aprovechabilidad de las estrategias? El presente estudio demuestra que la mayoría de los profesores de geografía consideran que las estrategias dirigidas a las habilidades de pensamiento son una buena manera para estimular tanto el aprendizaje de los alumnos como su propio aprendizaje. Nach einer konstruktiven Untersuchung im Unterrichtsbereich und unter Zugrundelegung des Werkes von Adey und Shayer entwickelte eine aus Geografie-Lehrern und -Lehrbeauftragten bestehende Gruppe aus Nordostengland erfolgreiche Strategien, um die Denkfähigkeiten der Schüler und Schülerinnen anzuregen. Zu Beginn dieses Jahrhunderts erreichten die Ideen die Niederlande. In diesem Artikel werden die Ergebnisse einer Untersuchung bei niederländischen Geografielehrern dargelegt, die an einem Lehrerfortbildungskurs über Denkfähigkeitsstrategien für den Geografieunterricht teilnahmen. Haben diese Lehrer wirklich die Strategien in ihren Klassenräumen nach dem Fortbildungskurs genutzt? Wie wirkte sich dieser Kurs auf ihre Meinungsbildung zur Brauchbarkeit der Strategien aus? Diese Studie zeigt, dass die meisten Geografielehrer die Denkfähigkeitsstrategien als gutes Mittel zur Anregung des Lernens der Schüler- und Schülerinnen und ihres eigenen Lernens schätzen.

Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies

Neil Brenner — 2007-11-18T12:21:31-00:00

Theory and Society, Vol. 28, No. 1. (1999), pp. 39-78.

Increasing Returns and Economic Geography

Paul Krugman — 2006-10-11T19:05:22-00:00

The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 99, No. 3. (1991), pp. 483-499.

This paper develops a simple model that shows how a country can endogenously become differentiated into an industrialized "core" and an agricultural "periphery." In order to realize scale economies while minimizing transport costs, manufacturing firms tend to locate in the region with larger demand, but the location of demand itself depends on the distribution of manufacturing. Emergence of a core-periphery pattern depends on transportation costs, economies of scale, and the share of manufacturing in national income.

'But indifferently lodged...': Perception and place in building for science in Victorian London, in Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge

S Forgan — 2008-01-03T12:30:45-00:00

(04 March 1998), pp. 195-215.

Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display

Carla Yanni — 2008-01-03T10:49:33-00:00

(01 September 1999)

Scientists in the medieval and early-modern eras faced many obstacles to sharing their discoveries, among them the lack of organized, comparative collections of specimens. Such assemblages were almost exclusively in the hands of wealthy individuals, and scholars of more modest means had to content themselves with "cabinets of wonder," potpourris of natural curiosities whose message was often no more profound than "behold, death is near." One of the signal developments of the Victorian era, observes art historian Carla Yanni, was the building of great museums, accessible to both scholars and the interested public, to house large collections of fossils, minerals, and other relics of the natural world. Some of these museums, such as London's Pantherion, offered astonishing and sometimes fictitious spectacles: in the Pantherion, for example, "stuffed animals were staged in frightening battles," while a great artificial swamp filled with sculptures of dinosaurs ringed the Sydenham Crystal Palace. Others, such as the incomparable Natural History Museum of London, became clearinghouses for the exchange of scientific ideas in the age of Darwin and Huxley. By the 1880s, science museums of all kinds had become popular destinations for family outings, and also the subject of considerable debate, with some scholars objecting to the supposed vulgarization of knowledge to which spectacles inevitably led. But, Yanni notes, in their many forms, these museums also became the "primary places of interaction between natural science and its diverse publics," allowing greater participation in learning and ultimately serving science well. Heavily illustrated with period engravings and architectural renderings, Yanni's book is a useful and entertaining contribution to the history of science. --Gregory McNamee "Nature's Museums . . . is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of public architecture, scientific practice, and the cultural life of the Victorian era." -- Jim Secord, University of Cambridge Cabinets of curiosity, glass-enclosed cathedrals stuffed with sea shells, butterflies, lizards, birds, animals, and exotic marvels of all kinds -- our Victorian forebears went to extraordinary lengths to acquire and display the strange fruits of the earth. Their carefully organized collections helped shape our vision of the natural world and form the social and architectural construction of knowledge we confront today. In this beautifully illustrated book, historian Carla Yanni brings together the history of architecture and the history of science in an engaging study of how the Victorians approached the housing and display of scientific artifacts.

Geographical distances and the similarity among parasite communities of conspecific host populations.

R Poulin — 2007-01-01T19:42:27-00:00

Parasitology, Vol. 119 ( Pt 4) (October 1999), pp. 369-374.

The geographical distance between conspecific host populations is no doubt a key determinant of the likelihood that exchanges of parasite species occur between these populations. This variable must therefore be taken into account in studies that compare parasite species richness or similarity among host populations. This paper presents a multivariate approach, based on the permutation of matrices, that allows all pairwise geographical distances between host populations to be included as independent variables. The method is illustrated with 3 separate data sets on parasite communities of conspecific fish from different lakes. In 2 of 3 cases, geographical distances among lakes had a significant influence on the similarity of their parasite communities. The effect of geographical distance on species richness of parasite communities also proved important in 2 of the 3 case studies. These examples demonstrate the pervasive influence of distances among host populations on their parasite communities, and the need to properly control for them in statistical analyses.

Geographies of Young People (Critical Geographies)

Stuart Aitken — 2006-04-27T23:56:27-00:00

(01 September 2001)

Anxieties over children's safety or teenage propensities towards violence and sex have precipitated a moral panic in a large swathe of our society. This provocative work traces the changing scientific and societal notions of what it is to be a young person, and argues that there is a need to rethink how we view childhood spaces, child development and the politics of growing up. The book challenges popular myths that evoke general notions of childhood as a natural stage in the development towards adulthood and offers alternative theories that value the embodiment and local embeddedness of young people.

The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

David Harvey — 2005-08-30T03:34:14-00:00

(01 October 1989)

The Condition of Postmodernity is David Harvey's seminal history of our most equivocal of eras. What does postmodernism mean? Where did it come from? Harvey, a professor of geography and a key mover behind extending the scope and influence of the discipline of geography itself, does a thorough job here delineating the passage through to postmodernity and the economic, social, and political changes that underscored and accompanied it. As he clearly states, the rise in postmodernist cultural forms is related to a new intensity in what Harvey terms "time-space compression," but this new intensity is a qualitative rather than quantitative change in social organization, and it does not point to an era beyond capitalism as "the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation" remain unchanged. Unlike Fredric Jameson (whose equally rewarding Postmodernism stands as the twin pillar to Harvey's critique), who explicitly relies on Ernest Mandel's periodization of late capitalism, Harvey eschews a narrowly economic focus, the limits and contradictions of production that have led to the rise in the service sector, and takes a more multidisciplinary approach to his history. As comfortable discussing Manet as he is labor markets, Harvey is an excellent writer, and The Condition of Postmodernity is an exceptionally informative and enjoyable read. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk A great deal has been written on what has variously been described as the post-modern condition and on post-modern culture, architecture, art and society. In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience. But the book is much more than this: in the course of his investigation the author provides a social and semantic history - from the Enlightenment to the present - of modernism and its expression in political and social ideas and movements, as well as in art, literature and architecture. He considers in particular how the meaning and perception of time and space themselves vary over time and space, and shows that this variance affects individual values and social processes of the most fundamental kind. This book will be widely welcomed, not only for its clear and critical account of the arguments surrounding the propositions of modernity and post-modernity, but as an incisive contribution to the history of ideas and their relation to social and political change.

The Production of Space

H Lefebvre — 2005-11-21T06:01:20-00:00

(15 August 1991)

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style that Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge

Gillian Rose — 2005-11-21T05:50:48-00:00

Media Discourse on Globalization and Terror

Andre Rojecki — 2005-04-14T18:49:26-00:00

Political Communication, Vol. 22, No. 1. (March 2005), pp. 63-81.

INTERNET, SCALE AND THE GLOBAL GRASSROOTS: GEOGRAPHIES OF THE INDYMEDIA NETWORK OF INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTRES

Virginie Mamadouh — 2004-12-28T15:38:39-00:00

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Vol. 95, No. 5., 482.

Why is economic geography not an evolutionary science? Towards an evolutionary economic geography

Boschma — 2006-05-19T15:25:27-00:00

Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 6, No. 3. (June 2006), pp. 273-302.

Trees of the Essential Economic Structures: A Qualitative Input-Output Method

Aroche — 2006-04-26T09:03:32-00:00

Journal of Regional Science, Vol. 46, No. 2. (May 2006), pp. 333-353.

Agricultural turns, geographical turns: retrospect and prospect

C Morris — 2004-12-28T16:44:35-00:00

Journal of Rural Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1. (January 2004), pp. 95-111.

Complexity thinking and evolutionary economic geography

Ron Martin — 2008-05-30T12:30:54-00:00

J Econ Geogr, Vol. 7, No. 5. (1 September 2007), pp. 573-601.

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionary economic geography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionary economics, namely the Nelson-Winter framework, which blends Darwinian concepts and metaphors (especially variety, selection, novelty and inheritance) and elements of a behavioural theory of the firm. Much less attention has been directed to an alternative conception based on complexity theory, yet in recent years complexity theory has increasingly been concerned with the general attributes of evolutionary natural and social systems. In this article we explore the idea of the economic landscape as a complex adaptive system. We identify several key notions of what is being called the new complexity economics', and examine whether and in what ways these can be used to help inform an evolutionary perspective for understanding the uneven development and adaptive transformation of the economic landscape. 10.1093/jeg/lbm019

Places of Work, Scales of Organising: A Review of Labour Geography

David Lier — 2007-07-16T08:05:25-00:00

Geography Compass, Vol. 1, No. 4. (2007), pp. 814-833.

Abstract Labour has for a long time been an important concept in economic geography, but more often as a cost that influences investment decisions than as a social force in its own right. Recently, however, some geographers have begun putting the politics of labour at the forefront of the analysis. Labour geography can be understood as a discernible strand of research which, throughout the last decade or so, has begun to emerge from a wider Anglo-American Marxist-inspired geography tradition. In this article, I will critically review this emerging literature, which represents a fresh approach to the recent changes in the world of work and to the close relationships between workers, firms, the state and the wider community. Particularly interesting - from a geographical point of view - are the strategies of organised labour in creating new scales of organising, and in rethinking old ones.

Information-seeking behavior of undergraduate geography students

Kathy Fescemyer — 2004-12-22T20:59:53-00:00

Research Strategies, Vol. 17, No. 4. ( 2000), pp. 307-317.

A bibliographic instruction program to help undergraduate students in World Regional Geography locate current and historical resources to create answers for the midterm examination is described. Student papers were analyzed by citation analysis to determine what types of resources students used to gather information to create the answers. Students used a wide variety of sources in print and electronic formats to gather information for the test. The fall semester students cited print sources 62% compared to citations from electronic sources at 36% and lecture notes at 2%. The spring semester students cited print sources 51% as compared to electronic sources at 47% and lecture notes at 2%.

Why Geography Matters : Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism

Harm de Blij — 2006-05-10T16:09:03-00:00

(01 September 2005)

Over the next half century, the human population, divided by culture and economics and armed with weapons of mass destruction, will expand to nearly 9 billion people. Abrupt climate change may throw the global system into chaos; China will emerge as a superpower; and Islamic terrorism and insurgency will threaten vital American interests. How can we understand these and other global challenges? Harm de Blij has a simple answer: by improving our understanding of the world's geography. De Blij demonstrates how geography's perspectives yield unique and penetrating insights into the interconnections that mark our shrinking world. Centuries ago a surge of climate change halted China's maritime plans; more recently, environmental calamity altered the course of geopolitical events in East Asia; today, terrorists look for failed and malfunctioning states to base their operations--and some of these are in our own hemisphere. Preparing for climate change, averting a cold war with China, defeating terrorism: all of this requires geographic knowledge. In Why Geography Matters, de Blij makes an urgent call to restore geography to America's educational curriculum. He shows how and why the U.S. has become the world's most geographically illiterate society of consequence--and demonstrates that this geographic illiteracy is a direct risk to America's national security. In this personal and engaging book, de Blij provides a geographer's perspective on the challenges of this new century. As he states, "We are crossing the threshold to a century that will witness massive environmental change, major population shifts, persistent civilizational conflicts [and] while geographic knowledge by itself cannot solve these problems, they will not be effectively approached without it."

Phylogenetic comparative methods and the geography of speciation

Jonathan Losos — 2007-12-09T03:26:18-00:00

Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 18, No. 5. (May 2003), pp. 220-227.

The geography of speciation has long been contentious. In recent years, phylogenetic approaches have been proposed to determine the geographical mode of speciation. If reliable, these methods not only provide a means of settling the debate about the geography of speciation, but also indicate that sympatric speciation is surprisingly common and that peripatric speciation is relatively rare. Similar to any phylogenetic inference, reconstructions of speciation mode are only useful if the underlying assumptions of the method are met. In this case, the key assumption is that the geographical range of both extant and ancestral species at the time of speciation can be inferred from present-day distributions. We discuss whether, and under what circumstances, such assumptions could be met. We conclude that interspecific phylogenies are unable to test alternative hypotheses concerning the geography of speciation rigorously because of the lability of geographical ranges and the lack of correlation between the role of adaptive processes and geographical mode of speciation.

GIR '05: Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Geographic information retrieval

Chris Jones — 2006-06-26T11:16:08-00:00

(2005)

General Chair-Chris Jones and General Chair-Ross Purves

Web-a-where: geotagging web content

Einat Amitay — 2006-01-29T22:33:33-00:00

(2004), pp. 273-280.

We describe Web-a-Where, a system for associating geography with Web pages. Web-a-Where locates mentions of places and determines the place each name refers to. In addition, it assigns to each page a geographic focus --- a locality that the page discusses as a whole. The tagging process is simple and fast, aimed to be applied to large collections of Web pages and to facilitate a variety of location-based applications and data analyses.Geotagging involves arbitrating two types of ambiguities: geo/non-geo and geo/geo. A geo/non-geo ambiguity occurs when a place name also has a non-geographic meaning, such as a person name (e.g., Berlin) or a common word (Turkey). Geo/geo ambiguity arises when distinct places have the same name, as in London, England vs. London, Ontario.An implementation of the tagger within the framework of the WebFountain data mining system is described, and evaluated on several corpora of real Web pages. Precision of up to 82% on individual geotags is achieved. We also evaluate the relative contribution of various heuristics the tagger employs, and evaluate the focus-finding algorithm using a corpus pretagged with localities, showing that as many as 91% of the foci reported are correct up to the country level.

National carbon dioxide emissions: geography matters

Eric Neumayer — 2008-02-29T14:15:04-00:00

Area, Vol. 36, No. 1. (2004), pp. 33-40.

This article examines the role of geographical factors as determinants of cross-country differences in per capita carbon dioxide emissions. Such differences have been explained by economists mostly in terms of per capita income. Geographical factors on the other hand have been neglected by economic analysis. We examine the effects of cold and hot climates, transportation requirements and the availability of renewable energy sources on emissions. We find that with the exception of cooling requirements as measured by hot climates, all these geographical factors are statistically significant determinants of emissions in accordance with our expectation. Furthermore, cold climates and the availability of renewable resources are also substantively important.

'You cannot shake that shimmie here': producing mobility on the dance floor

Tim Cresswell — 2005-12-15T14:51:52-00:00

Cultural Geographies, Vol. 13, No. 1. (January 2006), pp. 55-77.

The Cultures of Cities

Sharon Zukin — 2006-01-17T19:27:39-00:00

(18 December 1995)

When Lewis Mumford wrote his now-classic The Culture of Cities in 1934, it could safely be assumed that "culture" was an epiphenomenon that sprung organically from the activities of the people of a city. Zurkin builds upon Mumford's arguments for a late 20th-century reinterpretation, discussing the ways in which cities' cultures are increasingly the product of complex negotiations between ethnic groups, artistic and architectural elites, and multinational purveyors of canned culture. Her chapters dealing with the effects of Disneyland on urban planning, the creation of a "cultural center" in the rural Berkshires, and the nature of shopping in urban settings are particularly intriguing. Her primary concern is how economic elites gain the upper hand in representation as the culture of a city: in her view, culture is, increasingly, a consciously synthesized mirage optimized for economic gain. Recommended.

The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space

Don Mitchell — 2006-01-17T20:32:33-00:00

(24 February 2003)

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks, efforts to secure the American city have life-or-death implications. Yet demands for heightened surveillance and security throw into sharp relief timeless questions about the nature of public space, how it is to be used, and under what conditions. Blending historical and geographical analysis, this book examines the vital relationship between struggles over public space and movements for social justice in the United States. Presented are a series of linked cases that explore the judicial response to public demonstrations by early twentieth-century workers, and comparable legal issues surrounding anti-abortion protests today; the Free Speech Movement and the history of People's Park in Berkeley; and the plight of homeless people facing new laws against their presence in urban streets. The central focus is how political dissent gains meaning and momentum--and is regulated and policed--in the real, physical spaces of the city.

History and philosophy of geography, 2002-2003: geography in its place

WJ Withers — 2005-03-10T08:48:43-00:00

Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 29, No. 1. (February 2005), pp. 64-72.

Hierarchical organization of cities and nations

G Malescio — 2007-03-20T23:18:29-00:00

(10 May 2000)

Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in nature is cooperative evolution. The interaction of individuals gives rise to a wide variety of collective phenomena that strongly differ from individual dynamics---such as demographic evolution, cultural and technological development, and economic activity. A striking example of such cooperative phenomena is the formation of urban aggregates which, in turn, can be considered to cooperate in giving rise to nations. We find that population and area distributions of nations follow an inverse power-law behavior, as is known for cities. The exponents, however, are radically different in the two cases ($μ ≈ 1$ for nations, $μ ≈ 2$ for cities). We interpret these findings by developing growth models for cities and for nations related to basic properties of partition of the plane. These models allow one to understand the empirical findings without resort to the introduction of complex socio-economic factors.

Geographic Regularities in Residential Search Behavior

James Huff — 2007-05-28T17:02:08-00:00

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 76, No. 2. (1986), pp. 208-227.

Households exhibit strong spatial regularities in their residential search behavior; moreover these regularities arise from two distinct but interrelated sources: the spatial variation in the number of vacancies meeting particular housing needs and spatial biases in the household's search strategies. Three models of the search process are evaluated against observed search behavior for a sample of prospective home buyers in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles; in each instance, analysis of observed search behavior supports the hypothesized relationship between the search pattern and the locational variables influencing it. A constrained choice set model calls attention to the relationship between the spatial variation in the number of vacancies in the household's possibility set and the pattern of vacancies visited by the household. The area-based search model focuses on the locational persistence in the household's search behavior. The key to the anchor points model is that locational preference declines with increasing distance from critical anchor points in the household's activity space. The locations of the prior residence and the workplace (or workplaces for dual worker households) are shown to have a significant influence on the resulting pattern of vacancies seen by the household.

Geographic Automata Systems

Paul Torrens — 2007-05-28T17:35:05-00:00

pp. 385-412.

A novel approach to automata-based modeling for spatial systems is described: geographic automata and Geographic Automata Systems. We detail a framework that takes advantage of the formalism of automata theory and GI Science to unite cellular automata and multi-agent systems techniques, and provides a spatial approach to bottom-up modeling of complex geographic systems that are comprised of infrastructure and human objects. The suitability of the framework is also discussed with reference to existing cellular automata and multi-agent systems models used in urban studies. Practical implementation of the framework is illustrated with reference to an object-based urban simulation environment and implementation of a popular socio-spatial segregation model.

Movement-generated land-use agglomeration: simulation experiments on the drivers of fine-scale land-use patterning

Alan Penn — 2007-05-28T17:34:14-00:00

pp. 81-96.

Groups of mobile sighted individuals, whether insect, animal or human, behave in complex ways as they search their environment for the resources needed to live. Among urban human societies, search behaviour is complex and emergent since it relates to settlement morphology and land-use pattern, both of which themselves result from human activity. Recently, agent simulation experiments have been used to study patterns of emergent behaviour in the dynamics of crowd movement and in the construction of paths through open space. Here we report simulations in which agents are given long-distance vision and direct their behaviour in response to information from the entire cone of vision afforded by the morphology of the local environment and their gaze direction. We show that the morphology of the environment and the location and aggregation patterns of resources within that environment affect the efficiency with which these agents can conduct their search. Linear streets and clustered aggregations afford efficient search for multi-target ‘comparison’ behaviour where agents search among a number of targets for a ‘best match’ to their requirements, while dispersed locations are most efficient for single target ‘convenience’ trips. We propose that urban space morphology and retail location patterns may have evolved to support efficient search. Finally, we argue that knowledge of distributed processes of decision taking such as that involved in search for resources and location selection on the part of resource providers, could lead to a new intellectual framework for land use planning.URBAN DESIGN International (2004) 9, 81–96. doi:10.1057/palgrave.udi.9000120

Growing Silicon Valley on a landscape: an agent-based approach to high-tech industrial clusters

Junfu Zhang — 2007-05-28T18:10:37-00:00

Entrepreneurships, the New Economy and Public Policy (2005), pp. 71-90.

We propose a Nelson-Winter model with an explicitly defined landscape to study the formation of high-tech industrial clusters such as those in Silicon Valley. The existing literature treats clusters as the result of location choices and focuses on how firms may benefit from locating in a cluster. We deviate from this tradition by emphasizing that high-tech industrial clusters are characterized by concentrated entrepreneurship. We argue that the emergence of clusters can be explained by the social effect through which the appearance of one or a few entrepreneurs inspire many followers locally. Agent-based simulation is employed to show the dynamics of the model. Data from the simulation and the properties of the model are discussed in light of empirical regularities. Variations of the model are simulated to study policies that are favorable to the high-tech economy.

Agent-Based Geo-simulation to Support Human Planning and Spatial Cognition

Nabil Sahli — 2007-05-28T18:05:53-00:00

Multi-Agent-Based Simulation VI (2006), pp. 115-132.

In this paper we emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of human planning and especially within a geographic space. We propose a multi-agent simulation approach in order to overcome some of these limitations while reasoning about a large-scale geographic space. A cognitive complementarity between software agents and human beings emerges from this approach. An illustration on wildfire fighting is presented.

On the pitfalls of geographic face routing

Young-Jin Kim — 2005-12-05T05:42:03-00:00

(2005), pp. 34-43.

BGR: Blind Geographic Routing

For Networks — 2006-09-06T04:44:45-00:00

This paper introduces BGR, a new beacon-less geographic routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks. Data packets are forwarded toward the destination, and nodes which hear the packet compete for becoming the next hop. A recovery strategy is provided for the case of empty forwarding areas. The main innovation is a strategy to avoid simultaneous forwarding situations, which would otherwise cause packet failures. It is confirmed by simulation that BGR sends very few packets and is...

Geography-informed energy conservation for Ad Hoc routing

Ya Xu — 2006-06-30T07:11:49-00:00

(2001), pp. 70-84.

The future of geography

Nigel Thrift — 2006-02-07T08:31:54-00:00

Geoforum, Vol. 33, No. 3. (August 2002), pp. 291-298.

Mapping politics: how context counts in electoral geography

John Agnew — 2006-02-07T20:59:49-00:00

Political Geography, Vol. 15, No. 2. (February 1996), pp. 129-146.

Electoral geography, indeed political geography in general, has been largely concerned with mapping distributions which are then ‘explained’ by non-spatial factors. To the extent that spatial context itself has counted, it has been largely in terms of locality or neighborhood effects which are presumed to work against ‘larger’ or ‘wider’ social processes. This paper takes issue with conventional mapping and locality-effect accounts of context on the ground that each involves a radical ontological separation of space and society that cannot be sustained. A concept of context-as-place is elaborated which abandons the identification of context with a single (local) geographical scale and provides a way of bridging the gap between abstract sociological and concrete geographical analysis. The potential of the concept is explored in a series of analyses of Italian electoral geography over the period 1947-1994.

Switching cities off

Stephen Graham — 2008-01-09T17:12:38-00:00

City, Vol. 9, No. 2. (2005), pp. 169-194.

In this follow-up to a piece originally published in City 8(2), Stephen Graham offers a detailed portrait of the tactics and techniques of contemporary urban warfare. As cities have become more reliant than ever on networks, and as their infrastructures have become more fragile due to the vagaries of neoliberal privatization, urban-based warfare, which targets the systems—informational, medical, agricultural, and technological—that sustain the civilian populations of cities, has had disastrous consequences. Although terrorists have chosen to target urban infrastructures in an attempt to disrupt modern urban life, Graham suggests that the greater threat to metropolitan existence comes from systematic attempts by traditional powers, such as the United States, to disrupt urban networks, thereby effectively ‘switching cities off’. Policies of what Graham calls ‘deliberate demodernization’ have become the hallmark of US air power. Although such policies are thought to bring about asymmetrical military advantage, they also place civilian populations at risk. Such policies represent thus perpetuation of total war in a different key. Graham concludes by calling for further research into the new geopolitics of infrastructural warfare.

Editorial: Geographys place in the life-science era?

S Whatmore — 2005-10-11T12:59:13-00:00

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 24, No. 3. (September 1999), pp. 259-260.

The spaces of actor-network theory

Jonathan Murdoch — 2006-02-07T08:36:45-00:00

Geoforum, Vol. 29, No. 4. (November 1998), pp. 357-374.

In this paper I want to consider whether actor-network theory [ANT] gives rise to a new kind of geography, or, perhaps more specifically, a new kind of geographical analysis. The paper therefore seeks to identify the main types of spaces implicated in the typical network configurations found in actor-network studies. Following a review of the ANT literature I conclude that two main spatial types can be discerned, linked to the degrees of remote control and autonomy found in networks. I characterise these two types as ‘spaces of prescription’ and ‘spaces of negotiation’. I go on to elaborate what a geography of prescription and negotiation might imply both for spatial analysis and actor-network theory. This paper is therefore one attempt to think through some of the implications that ANT holds for the study of space.

Geographies of nano-technoscience

B Anderson — 2007-06-30T19:07:51-00:00

Area, Vol. 39, No. 2. (June 2007), pp. 139-142.

Imaging the World in a Barrel: CORONA and the Clandestine Convergence of the Earth Sciences

John Cloud — 2008-01-16T16:15:11-00:00

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 31, No. 2. (1 April 2001), pp. 231-251.

The CORONA satellite reconnaissance programme (1958-72), the first American enterprise for secret photography from space, was predicated on fundamental progress within the strategic earth sciences necessary to resolve the Figure of the Earth with sufficient fidelity to wage or prevent nuclear war. CORONA in turn rapidly evolved from an interim reconnaissance system to a sophisticated series of earth remote-sensing imagery and data systems, which initiated the modern era of global satellite remote sensing. These innovative scientific applications were the results of a productive convergence in the post-war strategic earth sciences, the details and mechanisms of which were diffused and concealed by elaborate security protocols. With CORONA's declassification, and prospects for further declassification of Cold War-era archives, a window is opened into the clandestine reconfiguration of the strategic earth sciences and their complex integration with military and intelligence research and applications during the Cold War. 10.1177/0306312701031002005