网络信息空间的城市地理学研究：综述与展望

20世纪90年代,互联网飞速发展,不仅深刻地影响了我们的社会系统和经济结构,同时也重构了全球城市的物理和虚拟空间结构形式。近几年,在西方发达国家,网络信息空间的相关研究已经成为多学科研究的热点,有关城市网络信息空间的地理学研究也不断涌现。从技术与经济的角度入手,在已有文献资料基础上,对西方地理学界关于网络信息空间与城市发展的研究进展进行了评述。首先界定网络信息空间的概念及其相对于物理空间的各种特征,然后总结城市学者研究网络信息空间的几种理论方法,并从三个空间层次分别评述现有的实证研究成果。在此基础上,对网络信息空间的测量方法和关于城市地理学的研究内容进行了进一步展望。     

网络信息空间的地理学研究回顾与展望

网络信息空间（以下简称网络空间）的地理学是当前地理学研究的重点方向之一。1991年万维网诞生并向大众普及后网络空间开始得到广泛认可,同时其作为一种新的空间与事物也吸引了地理学界的高度关注。以多种期刊数据库和搜索引擎为检索源,考察国内外网络空间的地理学研究成果。依据研究内容将国外研究归纳为网络空间地理内涵、虚拟社区、虚拟化身与认知、网络空间的经济地理学,网络空间制图和互联网6个重点研究领域,将国内研究归纳为互联网的区域作用、网站和虚拟地理环境3个热点领域,并分别进行了梳理回顾。最后对国内外研究进行了简要评述,从网络空间的外部层面、内部层面和作用层面提出了若干研究议题。     

基于微博平台的中国城市网络信息不对称关系研究

网络信息空间的空间关系及信息流研究为信息化影响下的地理空间演变研究奠定基础。借助微博这一新兴网络信息传播平台获取中国城市间网络信息联系数据,采用流分析方法呈现城市间网络信息联系的空间格局。研究发现:中国城市网络信息关系呈现出"一超多强"的空间极化不对称格局。网络空间不对称格局与地理距离、经济社会发展水平存在密切关联性,表现为:城市对外网络信息总不对称度与其经济社会发展水平的相对一致性;经济社会发展差距对城市间网络信息不对称程度影响的距离衰减性;城市间网络信息不对称程度与经济社会发展差距的相对一致性;东、中、西部三大地区间网络信息不对称关系与经济发展梯度的相对一致性。     

Maps as geomedial action spaces: considering the shift from logocentric to egocentric engagements

This paper considers some significant questions in geography and cognate fields about the roles of maps in the information age. Most maps are now digital products, offering immersive environments for user involvement. The increasingly networked digital distribution of geographic information in consumer-orientated cartographic representations leads to substantial changes how people individually and collaboratively experience and produce space and place. This article focuses on the ongoing metamorphosis arising through geobrowsing, the media-based flexible production of geographic knowledge through interactive maps. Drawing on work in media studies influenced by the so-called spatial turn—the rediscovering of geography-related questions in the social sciences and humanities, after modernism’s claimed prioritization of time and history (Soja in Postmodern Geographies. The reassertion of space in critical social theory, London, 1989; Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, 1991)—this paper develops a theoretical framework built on the dynamic networked geomedial action spaces concept to understand the changing roles of information age maps as imagined materialist spaces for the experience and production of space—ultimately a medial turn. Following this concept, maps change from offering static and non-interactive frames of geographic reference for the production of space and place and as geomedia support a veritable infinity of interactive and map-based activities. Geobrowsing facilitates some new modes of geographic interactions that move from logocentric engagements with static maps to egocentric dynamic interactions with code-based elements of geomedial action spaces. Google Earth and similar geomedia facilitate maps that become intrinsic to a growing number of social action spaces and alter the experience and production of space and place.     

The geographies of difference in conflating digital and offline spaces of encounter: Migrant professionals' throwntogetherness in Singapore

This article explores the effects of people's digital coexistence on the construction of difference and feelings of aversion to or recognition of “others”. It seeks to make a theoretical contribution to works on the geographies of difference and encounter, Internet or digital geography, as well as on migration and digital media, by highlighting the relevance of indirect and fleeting digital encounters and the dialectical process in which encounters play out in intertwined, specific and multiple digital and physical spaces that we define as “cON/FFlating situational places of encounter”. Based on a qualitative study with Chinese, Filipino and German migrant professionals in Singapore, it shows how fleeting digital encounters take an ambivalent role through challenging but also producing new “temporary fixings of difference”. As such they can engender new sensibilities for and openness toward the host society but also breed new, or aggravate existing, cultural stereotypes and prejudices. The findings show that inherited and instituted classificatory practices that people use to structure and make sense of their fleeting interactions with others in offline space are, where possible, transferred and imposed on encounters in digital space. At the same time, they are inflected or replaced with new markers of difference where ingrained sorting mechanisms applied in offline space did not help them make sense of encounters in digital space.     

The creative reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace

The Internet has often been portrayed as the ultimate leveler of information where existing hierarchies of power and privilege are undermined by meritocracy. Some websites and functions are, however, more equal than others. In particular, search engines such as Google have been a key means to construct meaning out of disorder. This ordering (or enclosing of the Internet commons), however, comes at a cost as a location within the top 10 Google search results, marks the boundary (albeit a fluid one) between the core and the periphery of the Internet. The recent incorporation of spatial elements into the Google indexing raises fresh and geographically relevant concerns. This article focuses on the construction, access and use of Google derived rankings to deploy geo-referenced information in the physical environment and the way this melding of code and place affects how people interact with place. Using the theoretical concept of DigiPlace this article analyzes how Google Maps and Google Earth are structured and shape what appears (and what does not) in cyberspace and DigiPlace. Of particular concern are the implications of a private corporation controlling this new space.     

Urban experience takes an informational turn: mobile internet usage and the unevenness of geosocial activity

Coinciding the widespread deployment of handheld information and communications technologies (ICT) there has been a rapid emergence of mobile Internet applications. Notably, these applications are designed to perform within operating systems that are not only Internet-connected but that are also location-aware and decoupled from any single point in space—design characteristics that enable instantaneous integration of users’ everyday ‘real-world’ experience with an array of Internet-based services. As a consequence, the experience of urban space can be mediated by digital information in ways that have not before been possible. In this article I explore the convergence of ongoing discussions about the digital divide, the nascent class of mobile ICT, and the urban communities that have been most adversely impacted by uneven technological landscapes. Building on this convergence, I argue that it is increasingly important to consider the impacts that pervasive mobile information have on the composition of everyday urban life.     

Splendid isolation: ‘Philosopher’s islands’ and the reimagination of space

This paper argues that the metaphorical figure of the island plays an important but profoundly ambiguous role in the imagination of social space. The paper argues that ‘utopic’ islands have historically provided a fictional domain of experimentation that has informed the constitution of ‘real’ state spaces. From the 16th to 20th centuries this took the form of an increasingly consolidated and ‘global’ endotopia: a world, exemplified by the ‘political’ map, full of state spaces constituted as interiors. More recently, islands have served a very different metaphoric function, being used to create and legitimise spaces of exteriority – ‘xenospaces’ such as the online worlds of the ‘metaverse’ and the arcane legal/financial spaces of offshore – which in combination constitute an emergent xenotopia. The ‘philosopher’s island’ (Mackay, 2010), therefore, represents a complex and polyvalent spatial form that serves to continuously and expediently redefine the nature of social space.     

Experimenting with spaces of encounter: Creative interventions to develop meaningful contact

To-date geographical research on encounters has primarily comprised observation of naturalistic settings (both micro publics and everyday public spaces) or narrative accounts of encounters generated by conventional methods, this paper focuses on a contrived spatial experiment to create meaningful contact across difference. Inspired by, and drawing on insights from, Architecture – a discipline relatively neglected by geographers in recent times – we use a creative form of spatial play to stimulate groups of people to explore their differences and to develop shared understandings. Whereas previous studies have identified the importance of material objects in art projects and home spaces in mediating relations between people, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the physical configuration of space in work on encounters, despite the fact that geography is a spatial discipline. Here, we engage directly with the role of the form and function of space. Our spatial experiments demonstrate how paying attention to the materiality of micro-spaces rather than social relations alone, can provide insights into the generation of positive interactions by contributing to a greater understanding of how meaningful encounters happen, and what can be done to facilitate them. Specifically, by exploring the size and configuration of space, issues of ownership and surveillance, the relationship between primary and secondary space, and aural architecture this research identifies how working together to create a shared private or intimate space – might facilitate a sense of empowerment and the production of social relations characterised by democracy and inclusion.     

Dancing with wolves: Making legal territory in a more-than-human world

As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human, and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking regarding territory.     

Food porn,pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace

By engaging with ‘pro-anorexia’ and ‘food porn’ on the Internet, this paper explores eating in cyberspace. Reflecting on the ways in which virtual, but affective, consumption is central to both food porn and pro-anorexia websites, the paper asks what the act of eating ‘triggers’ and produces, connects and displaces. It traces how eating in, and through, cyberspace shapes the biological materialities of bodies whilst also collapsing neat distinctions between offline and online worlds. Virtual vectors of spectating, salivating and digesting are disembodied and yet corporeal. Eating is seen to take place beyond and among bodies and to be dissipated both spatially and temporally. As such, cyberspace is outside and other to lived corporeality, and yet also folded into and productive of the intimate geographies and embodied subjectivities of everyday lives. As eating takes myriad forms across the de-materialised viscerality of the Internet, it also emerges as central to the production and ‘matter(ing)’ of cyberspace itself; this is (an) eating space in which what is eaten, by whom and with what bodies, perpetually shifts. Thus, seeking to contribute to geographical scholarship on affect and food, this paper engages with eating as both the subject of enquiry and also as a productive pathway into an interrogation of cyberspace and its place within the affective productions of the everyday. It suggests that this is a key site in which to explore the intimate socialities, materialities and biopolitics of food.     

Transpolitical geography

As political geography searches in desperation for new (theoretical) directions to follow, this paper argues that the category of the ‘political’ has already curved back on itself, attaining the status of the ‘transpolitical’. Hereinafter, politics will never finish replaying its own disappearance as effect. This curvature is itself associated with profound shifts in the experience of history and time, of geography and space, and of the very ideas of theory, politics and events—shifts which continue to fascinate, haunt and transfix political geography in the enigmatic hereafter of the transpolitical. Adopting the motifs of s(ed)uction, transpearing, superficial abysses, and hypertelia (the ‘end of the end’), the paper assesses: the transpolitical figures of anomaly, ecstasy, obesity and obscenity; the irruption of the hyperreal (the more real than the real); the mutation of the political scene of representation into the transpolitical ob-scene of pornogeography; the fatal strategies pursued by the masses in relation to the spectre of the (trans)political; and the challenge of a transfinite universe for conjuring theoretical practice at the end(s) of political geography. Beginning with the transition from the political era—dominated by the transgressive figure of anomie and the emancipatory promise of revolutionary subl(im)ation—to the transpolitical simulacrum—characterized by the errant figure of anomaly and the superficial abyss of potentialization—the paper attempts to animate a transpolitical geography which affirms the s(ed)uction of superficial abysses and instantiates an ethics of the transpearing event.     

Cloning colonialism: Residential development,transnational aspiration,and the complexities of postcolonial India

Within this article, we discuss/unpack a speculative international property development born out of a license agreement between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and real estate investment company, Anglo Indian. The proposed building of twelve cloned, MCC branded, cricket communities in India–targeted to the consumption-based lifestyles of India’s new middle class–is addressed within the context relational to the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of postcolonial India, shifting power dynamics within the international cricket formation, and the associated re-colonisation of cricket-related spaces/bodies. Anglo Indian’s proposed communities are understood as part of a complex assemblage of national and global forces and relations (including, but certainly not restricted to): transnational gentrification; urban (re)development; and, revised understandings of historical and geographic connections between places, governance, and the politics of be(long)ing in branded spaces. This analysis explicates how Anglo Indian’s idealized community development offers a literal and figurative space for embodied performance of “glocal competence” for consumption-based identity projects of the new Indian middle-class (Brosius, 2010, p. 13) through the somewhat ironic mobilization of colonial spatial logics and cultural aesthetics.     

Regulatory migration regimes and the production of space: The case of Nepalese workers in South Korea

This paper engages with contemporary debates in labour geography through its focus on: migrant workers as active agents of change; precarious employment, its complexities and consequences; and the importance of material spaces in migrant labour struggles. Since the early 2000s the South Korean government has been strengthening the institutionalised regulation of low-wage migrant workers. A key tool in this process is the Employment Permit System (EPS), in force since 2004. Under this policy migrant workers are temporary sojourners and effectively socio-politically, culturally and spatially excluded from Korean society. EPS restricts migrants’ freedom to choose or change workplaces, which renders them vulnerable to economic and social precarity. Employers use these restrictions to segregate migrant workers from co-nationals, and low-waged migrant workers often find themselves in exploitative working conditions in isolated places. This paper is based on deep ethnographic fieldwork in “Nepal Town” in Seoul and remote Nepalese workers’ accommodation. We examine how such precarious working conditions and isolation impact on workers’ active involvement in the formation and transformation of Nepal Town in Seoul. We examine the ways in which Nepal Town is a site of spatial agency and praxis for Nepalese workers and explore the potentialities of ‘reactive ethnicity’. The empirical insights provided, suggest that the regulatory migration regime for low-wage migrant workers is strongly linked with new formations of material landscapes of connection, mobility, freedom and safe space. Such space production enables migrant workers to perform agency and employ tactics of resistance in order to create spaces of possibility.     

The politics of identity: Ethnicity, minority and nationalism in Soviet Estonia

Identity has become one of the core concepts of political geography. This reflects the wide recognition of a post-structural conception of society and space, as well as the acknowledgement of the political character of identity. The present article focuses on the politics of identity, and discusses the politicized forms of identity as related to the Soviet state building policies and the Estonian spaces of resistance. It will be argued that neither identity nor the political demand in Soviet Estonia can be viewed in isolation from their historical and social contexts. Both Soviet state politics and the Estonian spaces of resistance reflected the prevailing conceptions of past and the contemporary political realities. This article examines those preconceptions of the political and territorial development in Soviet Estonia, and also illustrates the interdependent character of state politics and non-state activism. The first part of the article concentrates on the Soviet state building practices – the use of power, symbols, education – and the second part examines the various forms of non-state activism of Estonians.     

Proximity,subjectivity, and space: Rethinking distance in human geography

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorising, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis.     

C/S模式WebGIS架构技术

针对客户端／服务器(C／S)模式下三层体系构建原理以及地学空间数据库网络发布(WebGIS)特点,以MapGuide空间数据库引擎为核心,分析了嵌入式WebGIS功能接口和事件响应机理。提出了空间数据库与关系型数据库两大引擎之间实现互动链接的有效技术措施,从而弥补了MapGuide Viewer。插件赖以支持的MWF格式在专业属性数据操作方面的先天性不足。以青海地调院局域网建设实例为基础,详细阐述了C／S模式下青海省基础地学数据库网络框架建设的实现途径。该技术的成功运用,无疑拓宽了青海省地学数字化成果的共享应用渠道,提高了成果的再利用价值。     

地理学研究进展与前沿领域

现代地理学涵盖自然地理学、人文地理学和地理信息科学，其发展趋势是：相邻学科的交叉、渗透与融合，加强地理学内部的综合研究，地理过程的微观研究进一步深化，结合实践拓宽应用研究领域，实验与研究手段的现代化，理论思维模式的转变。地理学应在陆地表层过程与格局、全球环境变化及其区域响应、自然资源保障与生态环境建设、区域可持续发展及人地系统的机理与调控、地理信息科学和数字地球战略等前沿领域开拓创新，为促进地球系统科学的发展、协调人地关系等做出积极的贡献。