Land fragmentation due to rapid urbanization in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area: Analyzing the spatiotemporal patterns and drivers

Rapid urbanization of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area exemplifies the dominant US Southwest urban growth pattern of the past six decades. Using a combination of multitemporal land cover data, gradient analysis, and landscape metrics, we quantify and characterize spatiotemporal patterns of land fragmentation observed in Phoenix. We analyze historical, qualitative data to identify five major socio-ecological drivers critical to understanding the urbanization processes and fragmentation patterns: population dynamics, water provisioning, technology and transportation, institutional factors, and topography. A second objective is to assess the applicability and accuracy of National Land cover Database (NLCD)-—a widely used land cover dataset—-to detect and measure urban growth and land fragmentation patterns in the relatively treeless desert biome of the US Southwest. In contrast to studies in the temperate eastern USA where NLCD has proved inaccurate for detection of exurban development, our study demonstrates that NLCD is a reliable data source for measuring land use in the southwest, even in low-density environments. By combining qualitative analyses of social-ecological drivers with fragmentation analyses, we move toward an improved understanding of urbanization and insights on the human modification framework used widely in land change science.     

EXPRESSING “LOCAL CULTURE” IN HAWAI'I*

ABSTRACT. Detached from the mainland and with a distinct historical ethnic geography, the conquered kingdom of Hawai'i, now the fiftieth state, is the only U.S. state with an Asian and Pacific Islander majority as well as the highest percentage of racial and ethnic intermarriage. Hawai'i's population reflects the tensions between the culturally pluralistic “spirit of aloha” and the ethnic‐cum‐social stratification that has evolved from its historical economic geographies. In this article I focus on one of these strata—what is referred to as “local” culture—discussing its ethnogenesis and contemporary manifestations, and I apply Jonathan Okamura's 1981 model of situational ethnicity to examine how locals and new immigrants negotiate the ethnic dynamics and social expectations of their daily lives. I also discuss various ways in which “localness” is represented on O'ahu's economic landscape, with an analysis of the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet, as a holistic expression of local culture.     

MEXICAN URBAN COLONIAS IN THE SALT RIVER VALLEY OF ARIZONA

The history of the Salt River Valley is often characterized as a boomtown narrative that highlights the exploding Anglo population and rapid suburban sprawl that followed World War II. Frequently overlooked is the fundamental role that Mexicans played in the early suburbanization process through the formation of urban colonias, or suburban Mexican settlements. Early Mexican suburbs, despite their rural atmosphere, were connected to the pre–World War II urbanization process in the Salt River Valley. Our research seeks to amend and clarify the urban historical record by documenting the diverse and dispersed array of Mexican suburban settlements, a process generated by industrial agriculture, decentralization, and residential segregation.     

La Frontera and Beyond: Geography and Demography in Mexican American History*

The recent publication of an expansive national dataset, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, allows for new analyses of the historical geography and settlement of various immigrant and ethnic groups in the United States. The present research explores the growth, development, and geographic dispersion of the ethnic Mexican population, and outlines some of the demographic and social characteristics within significant clusters of this population in the United States across the first half of the twentieth century. The analysis does not attempt to overturn other geographies and ethnographies in Mexican American history, but through its ability to elucidate broad, national patterns it is able to create a more dynamic view of settlement, demonstrating the role of immigrants and of women immigrants in particular. Results indicate that place matters: the geographical context of arrival and settlement were key factors in differentiating communities and the lives of those who lived in them.     

OTHER ITEMS

Abstract

The recent publication of an expansive national dataset, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, allows for new analyses of the historical geography and settlement of various immigrant and ethnic groups in the United States. The present research explores the growth, development, and geographic dispersion of the ethnic Mexican population, and outlines some of the demographic and social characteristics within significant clusters of this population in the United States across the first half of the twentieth century. The analysis does not attempt to overturn other geographies and ethnographies in Mexican American history, but through its ability to elucidate broad, national patterns it is able to create a more dynamic view of settlement, demonstrating the role of immigrants and of women immigrants in particular. Results indicate that place matters: the geographical context of arrival and settlement were key factors in differentiating communities and the lives of those who lived in them.     

Landscape metrics for three-dimensional urban building pattern recognition

Understanding how landscape pattern determines population or ecosystem dynamics is crucial for managing our landscapes. Urban areas are becoming increasingly dominant social-ecological systems, so it is important to understand patterns of urbanization. Most studies of urban landscape pattern examine land-use maps in two dimensions because the acquisition of 3-dimensional information is difficult. We used Brista software based on Quickbird images and aerial photos to interpret the height of buildings, thus incorporating a 3-dimensional approach. We estimated the feasibility and accuracy of this approach. A total of 164,345 buildings in the Liaoning central urban agglomeration of China, which included seven cities, were measured. Twelve landscape metrics were proposed or chosen to describe the urban landscape patterns in 2- and 3-dimensional scales. The ecological and social meaning of landscape metrics were analyzed with multiple correlation analysis. The results showed that classification accuracy compared with field surveys was 87.6%, which means this method for interpreting building height was acceptable. The metrics effectively reflected the urban architecture in relation to number of buildings, area, height, 3-D shape and diversity aspects. We were able to describe the urban characteristics of each city with these metrics. The metrics also captured ecological and social meanings. The proposed landscape metrics provided a new method for urban landscape analysis in three dimensions.     

Mexican and Central American immigrant communities in the boom and bust housing markets of the 2000s

Classic immigrant enclaves, largely voluntary and temporary, have historically served as a strong platform for integration in United States metropolitan areas. However, trends in the early 2000s, including new destinations and skyrocketing housing costs, may have reshaped the landscape, particularly for numerically dominant immigrant groups with very low socioeconomic status. In this article, I use data for 56 metropolitan areas and 31,563 census tracts from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2009 American Community Survey to examine the relationship between the change in concentration of Mexican and Central American immigrants and the characteristics of neighborhoods in 2000. The analyses suggest that, across metropolitan areas, these immigrant communities consolidated in neighborhoods with low home values, adequate but overcrowded housing, relatively small shares of their own immigrant group, and large shares of other Hispanics. Demographic dynamics may have weakened immigrant support networks, leaving Mexican and Central American immigrants vulnerable, particularly in a subset of metropolitan areas where this population grew most substantially outside the central cities.     

基于GIS的承德乡村地名文化景观空间分布特征

将承德地区乡村地名作为离散点,以GIS中移动搜索法的点距离空间平滑分析法为支撑,从地理区域这一角度分析地名文化景观空间分布特征。研究发现：承德地区自然类景观,以“山”、“水文”、“动植物”命名的地名分布主要位于中低海拔高度的平坦地区;承德地区乡村地名文化景观划分为军事活动类、经济活动类、房屋建筑类、美愿与纪念类、满蒙少数民族语言及方言类,其空间分布特征与当地历史时期的军事、生产生活、社会变迁的相对频繁程度以及人口稠密情况基本上相符合。     

Buying Development: Housing and Urban Growth in Guadalajara,Mexico

This study analyzes how Mexican federal housing policy affects the production of space and the housing landscape in Guadalajara, Mexico. Using a wide-ranging database of parcels developed in metropolitan Guadalajara, we map all housing developments from 1970 to 2000 and classify them into three categories that reflect different development processes. The greatly increased number of social-interest houses, and the large extension of land area developed since 1990 are explained by federal housing program reforms. Informal settlements remain a major path to home ownership, but the percentage of housing developments that are informal and the percentage of informally developed land have declined since the 1980s. We also discovered a trend of increasing land area devoted to low-density, élite enclaves, and analyzed marketing strategies and land use patterns that occurred in these newer developments. All of these outcomes reflect a neoliberal ideology that promotes consumption and the privatization of space, but largely excludes the urban poor. The result is higher rates of home ownership, but in an increasingly segregated and fragmented landscape poorly served by public infrastructure and lacking in amenities.     

Continuity Amidst Change: Undocumented Mexican Migration to Arizona*

This study examines geographic patterns of undocumented Mexican migration to Arizona, utilizing Immigration and Naturalization Service records of deportable Mexican aliens. The analysis uses a comparison with known patterns for other destination states, as well as with historical information on Mexican migration to Arizona. The results reveal the importance of Arizona's unique historical connections with Mexico in formulating networks, which build on regional ties with Sonora and the greater Mexican northwest. Results also support the emergence of new migration systems, particularly the link with internal migration within Mexico through redistributor cities and migrant origins from outside of traditional sending areas.     

The meaning of place: Attachments to Femundsmarka National Park,Norway, among tourists and locals

In Norway, the management of natural and cultural resources is subject to increasing public scrutiny. Conflicts are escalating over many issues concerning the balance between preservation and utilisation. Traditionally conflicts over issues like growth in commercial nature tourism, predator control, forest policies, protected areas management, cultural heritage protection, and rights associated with common access, have been explained in terms of opposing values, attitudes, and goals between urban and rural interests. However, historical differences between the urban and rural in terms of social conditions, employment opportunities, services, cultural norms, and lifestyles are no longer clear-cut or predictable. Nor can differences between urban and rural communities easily explain attitudes or values held in relation to the environment. To examine how a local community and a population of tourists feel about an area we examine data from two separate surveys from the Femundsmarka-Røros region in Southern Norway. This region includes a wilderness-type national park and a historic mining town recognised as a World Heritage Site and including a diverse agricultural landscape. We compare the perspective of the community with that of tourists regarding the strength and nature of attachment to place, and reasons and priorities for resource protection. We also assess how residence and experience of using the area affect attachment to place and attitudes to management priorities. The results have implications both for the management of this particular area, and for how we approach attitude diversity in resource management.     

THE MONUMENT AND THE BUNGALOW

ABSTRACT. Students of human landscapes often view those landscapes as documents and seek to “read” them for cultural and historical meaning. But how does one learn to read landscape? And how can students be taught to do it? After many years of teaching courses about commonplace American landscapes, I have discovered that students must learn two things before they can expect to read human landscapes. First, they must learn to pay attention to commonplace things which most Americans normally ignore. Second, they must master vocabularies that permit them to classify elements in the landscape and to connect small things with larger ideas. Two examples in the landscape of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania—the town's war memorial and a scattering of California bungalows-demonstrate how these ideas work.     

From Forests and Fields to Coffee and Back Again: Historic Transformations of a Traditional Coffee Agroecosystem in Oaxaca,Mexico

Studies of coffee agroecosystems have focused on their role in providing habitat for biodiversity across a range of management intensities. These studies have not taken into account the temporal and spatial transformations in coffee landscapes and their impacts on structural heterogeneity and biodiversity, nor systematically linked these transformations to farmer management responses to price and policy shocks. We utilize a coupled natural–human system framework to examine the historical transformations of the coffee landscape in a matrix of community-protected forests in a coffee-growing community in Oaxaca, Mexico, and study how those transformations impact tree biodiversity across a range of management options, including formerly certified organic and conventional coffee, abandonment, and conversion. The coffee landscape has historically transitioned from forests and fields (1950s–1960s) to one dominated by coffee (1970s–1980s) to a richly mosaic and biodiverse landscape (1990–2010) resulting from 43% recent abandonment and conversion of coffee back to forest and fields.     

REJECTING VIOLENCE ON THE LANDSCAPE IN LAWRENCE,KANSAS*

ABSTRACT. Lawrence, Kansas, survived a tumultuous beginning. The young town endured attacks twice, in 1856 and 1863. The second raid, by the guerrilla William Quantrill's troop of more than 400 men, resulted in the deaths of 143 citizens. Lawrence serves as an example of how Americans memorialize unconventional warfare, targeted at citizens, in a material and permanent fashion on the landscape. Small and obscurely placed memorials fill the town, to the point that they have become ordinary. The memorialized landscapes of these tragedies thus display ambivalence toward the past and symbolically reject the loss of lives despite this era's high position in the literature and archival history of the town. Additionally, Lawrence has found alternative sources for its historical identity that do not reflect these tragedies but instead celebrate the city's pioneer establishment. In this article I use a set of methods for reading the memorialized landscape that includes archival and landscape analysis and uncovers the processes that have led to this town's understated and ambivalent memorialization and identity.     

芜湖市城市游憩商业区的形成及其空间结构分析

近年来,居民闲暇时间的增多以及生活水平的提高,使得城市的游憩功能愈来愈重要。城市游憩商业区（RBD）作为一种新的功能区,成为本地居民和外地旅游者进行旅游、休闲、娱乐、购物等活动的重要场所。建立了城市RBD的识别模型,据此界定芜湖市RBD的范围,分析了该RBD形成过程及空间结构,并探讨了其形成要素。     

Linking landscape and species: Effect of shrubs on patch preference of beetles in arid and semi-arid ecosystems

Linking individual behavior to spatial population processes, may clarify the complex link between species distribution and landscape properties. We asked how shrubs affect beetles in drylands and tested if we could explain distribution patterns of beetles by individual response to shrub landscape. We studied patch preference of ground-dwelling beetles segregated in a two-phase mosaic landscape, composed of shrub-covered and open patches and hypothesized that species richness and abundance are higher under shrubs due to the ameliorated microclimatic conditions and greater food resources. Pitfall trapping showed that shrub patches were preferred in shrub poor ecosystem because there was more food available under shrubs and cooler temperatures. However, similar conditions resulted in shrub preference only in an arid ecosystem, whereas in a semi-arid ecosystem, with high cover of shrubs, we found more beetles in the open patches. Observations in beetle movement patterns explained the contradicting effects of shrub patches in the two ecosystems. Beetle movement was affected by shrubs’ shading suggesting dependency on shrub structure rather than speciesdependency. Integrating analysis of beetle distribution in the population level with analysis of individual movement provides a robust framework for linking landscape properties to species behavior and distribution in a patchy landscape.     

从祠堂视角看明至民国初期佛山宗族文化景观的流变和社会文化空间分异

明以来佛山逐渐形成八图土著宗族文化景观和侨寓宗族文化景观并存的格局,对佛山城市空间发展产生影响。通过从古地图和文献中提取历史时期基本空间数据和祠堂等文化景观地理信息,建立佛山历史GIS数据库。以此为基础,通过景观复原、地图再现、空间分析和景观分析等方法,以祠堂景观为视角,解读明至民国初期佛山宗族文化景观时空演变及其所意涵的社会文化空间意义。结果表明:①宋元时期祠堂主要集中在佛山南部大塘涌沿岸,反映出宋代涌入佛山的移民早期多定居在南部;②明代佛山镇祠堂数量急增,表现出聚落空间由南部向中部扩展的趋势,祠堂景观基本形成了以南部的锦澜、东头、栅下铺和中部的祖庙、黄伞铺为中心的空间格局;③清以后祠堂景观总体空间格局没有大变化,但八图土著宗族内部产生的裂变促使土著祠堂景观发生空间扩散。土著祠堂与侨寓祠堂景观空间上既互补又相互混杂,说明随着侨寓的大量进入,土著传统血缘空间被打破,地缘、业缘等因素增强,这正适应了佛山城市化发展的大趋势。     

Hypsographic Demography Across Scale

The typical framework for assessing human population distribution is across a flat, two-dimensional landscape. We alter this perspective by examining population distribution with respect to a third dimension, elevation. This alternative framework, termed hypsographic demography, conceptually provides a more complete visualization and understanding of population distribution. We apply hypsographic demography to North Carolina from the scale of the entire state to streams of different sizes. At the state scale, elevation and population are generally inversely correlated. The flat coastal plain contains the majority of the population at low elevations, whereas higher elevations contain smaller populations due to steep topography, which limits development. At the county scale, the historic location and expansion of cities was more closely correlated with observed patterns of hypsographic demography than elevation or topography. At the scale of the stream, the influence of topography on hypsographic demographics gains importance where topography limits the land available to develop. We use this approach to illustrate how changing the perspective for viewing population distribution can be applied to floodplain policy.