A natural language processing and geospatial clustering framework for harvesting local place names from geotagged housing advertisements

Local place names are frequently used by residents living in a geographic region. Such place names may not be recorded in existing gazetteers, due to their vernacular nature, relative insignificance to a gazetteer covering a large area (e.g. the entire world), recent establishment (e.g. the name of a newly-opened shopping center) or other reasons. While not always recorded, local place names play important roles in many applications, from supporting public participation in urban planning to locating victims in disaster response. In this paper, we propose a computational framework for harvesting local place names from geotagged housing advertisements. We make use of those advertisements posted on local-oriented websites, such as Craigslist, where local place names are often mentioned. The proposed framework consists of two stages: natural language processing (NLP) and geospatial clustering. The NLP stage examines the textual content of housing advertisements and extracts place name candidates. The geospatial stage focuses on the coordinates associated with the extracted place name candidates and performs multiscale geospatial clustering to filter out the non-place names. We evaluate our framework by comparing its performance with those of six baselines. We also compare our result with four existing gazetteers to demonstrate the not-yet-recorded local place names discovered by our framework.     

Population growth and the development of a central place system

This paper describes the spatial and functional evolution of a central place system as market conditions change with population growth. Utilizing a partial equilibrium optimization model, we examine the spatial response of two economic sectors to increases in market populations resulting from natural increase and migration. Response in both sectors is conditioned by threshold demand, with factor prices also affecting one of the sectors. As the central place system evolves it exhibits spatial and functional characteristics that are initially consistent with a Löschian landscape, then a Christallerian landscape at higher populations, while at even larger populations Krugman’s landscape emerges.     

Branding the design metropole: the case of Montréal, Canada

As part of a broader process of inter-urban competition, city governments have increasingly sought to 'position' themselves as centres of creativity. In these branding initiatives, culture is viewed as a tool of urban regeneration and economic development. Our paper examines the case of Commerce Design Montréal, an annual design competition run by the City of Montréal, which aims to brand Montréal as a centre of design. Commerce Design Montréal is an example of a 'fast' policy initiated by the state, but carried out by business owners and citizens. As such, it represents a downloading of the responsibility for economic development to the private or individual scale and adopts only a partial view of the varied actors and uses that are implicated in the design process. The paper considers the opportunities and challenges that this model presents for promoting design as a form of urban regeneration in a neo-liberal context.     

晋城市下河泉水源地开发利用可行性分析

在野外调查和收集现有资料基础上,对下河泉水源地水文地质条件、泉水流量动态、水源地保证程度与可能的环境问题进行了分析,论证了建立下河泉水源地的可行性.     

The Mobile Street Food Service Practice in the Urban Economy of Kumba, Cameroon

The mobile food service practice is one of multiple survival strategies adopted by poor urban households in Cameroon to maintain and expand the base of subsistence incomes, especially in the current surge of economic crisis. Though a fast-growing informal sector enterprise, it is still at an artisanal stage in urban Cameroon, creating an urgent need for a supportive policy environment that could have measurable positive impacts on improving the productivity, welfare and income levels of the micro-entrepreneurs. This study looks at the mobile food service practice in Kumba, Cameroon, in terms of its basic characteristics, the locational factors influencing its socio-spatial distribution, the critical success factors (CSFs) determining customer choices, and its impacts on the local environmental resources and quality of urban life. The mobile food service practice creates employment, generates income, and acts as a food energy-support instrument to the urban poor and local economic activities operating in Kumba. The vendors, who are mostly women, can make incomes that are 405 per cent of the national minimum wage and, thus, contribute financially towards the education, health and survival of their families. The paper provides some recommendations on ways to improve the efficiency of this sector so as to achieve sustainable economic and social development and to enhance empowerment thereof.     

Religion and technology: refiguring place, space, identity and community

This paper reviews the literature on the religion–technology nexus, drawing up a research agenda and offering preliminary empirical insights. First, I stress the need to explore the new politics of space as a consequence of technological development, emphasizing questions about the role of religion in effecting a form of religious (neo)imperialism, and uneven access to techno-religious spaces. Second, I highlight the need to examine the politics of identity and community, since cyberspace is not an isotropic surface. Third, I underscore the need to engage with questions about the poetics of religious community as social relations become mediated by technology. Finally, I focus on questions about the poetics of place, particularly the technological mediation of rituals.     

RURAL PLACE ATTACHMENT IN HISPANO URBAN CENTERS*

ABSTRACT. Continued rural‐to‐urban migration has helped motivate cultural geographers, long suspected of having a rural bias, to include urban areas in their purview. Patterns of gender, class, ethnicity, and commercialization have proved to be fertile subjects for research, but the elastic links between rural and urban places are not yet well understood. Hispanos, despite intense feelings of loyalty to their rural villages, moved en masse to cities in the 1940s. By the 1950s a majority of Hispanos were living in regional urban centers of the upper Rio Grande country, where wages were higher and employment was secure. This Hispano experience is a crucible for examining how urbanites' attachment to rural places is manifested in various cultural expressions brought from country to city: painted murals, burial preferences, popular music, and irrigation ditches. Understanding threads of rural culture that have been incorporated into the urban fabric in turn leads to clearer comprehension of the emotional attachment that urbanites have for rural areas and a better appreciation of the complexity of the urban cultural environment.     

Re-placing the Pilbara's mining unions

This paper examines the attempt by mining management in Western Australia's Pilbara to replace mining unions—quite literally—by removing them from the processes of representation and bargaining. It analyses the way in which those unions have tried to re-place themselves, in the senses of transforming themselves in those spaces in which they were already operating and reviving themselves where they were not. Where unionists have succeeded in these engagements, it has been by working at a range of geographical scales, using the ‘power of place’ in the Pilbara and reshaping traditional geographies of union organisation. It is suggested here that many of these emergent outcomes are the result of the embeddedness of geographically specific historical structures along with new intersections of nationally and locally scaled labour politics.     

VIETNAMESE AMERICAN PLACE MAKING IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA*

ABSTRACT. Vietnamese Americans have made places for themselves in Northern Virginia by reconfiguring the geography of the suburban places they inherited, including former high-order central-place nodes. Vietnamese American residences, churches, cemetery plots, and other distinctive ethnic markers are by and large dispersed and rarely noticeable. Their retail districts, however, serve them in multiple material and symbolic ways, not unlike suburban Chinatowns.