A Review of “The Power of Place”

Two qualitative case studies, one focusing on K-12 teachers and the other on middle school students, explore key factors associated with using Geographic Information Systems in the classroom. In both studies, access to appropriate hardware is a critical barrier. Time is another critical barrier—time to learn the GIS software and time in the curriculum to incorporate GIS as a learning experience. In both case studies, learning the technology at the expense of learning spatial analysis was a danger, suggesting the need for conscious focus on the goal of using GIS to learn how to “do geography.”     

A Review of “Renewable Energy Project Development Under the Clean Development Mechanism: A Guide for Latin America”

Books reviewed in this article:

Kurt E. Engelmann and Vjeran Pavlakovic (eds.), Rural Development in Eurasia and the Middle East: Land Reform, Demographic Change, and Environmental Constraints

Gregory C. Randall, America's Original GI Town: Park Forest, Illinois

John B. Rehder, Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape

Cathy D. Knepper, Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal

Char Miller (ed.), Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict

Edward F. Bergman, The Spiritual Traveler: New York City: The Guide to Sacred Spaces and Peaceful Places

Rachel Pain, Michael Barke, Duncan Fuller, Jamie Gough, Robert MacFarlane, and Graham Mowl, Introducing Social Geographies

Tor A. Benjaminsen, and Christian Lund, (eds.), Politics, Property, and Production in the West African Sahel: Understanding Natural Resources Management

Al Gedicks, Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations

Maryann P. Feldman and Nadine Massard (eds.), Institutions and Systems in the Geography of Innovation

Richard Foglesong, Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando

Annick Germain, and Damaris Rose, Montréal: The Quest for a Metropolis

George F. Rengert, Mark T. Mattson, and Kristin D. Henderson, Campus Security: Situational Crime Prevention in High–Density Environments

Vaclav Smil, Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty–First Century

Pu Miao (ed.), Public Places in Asia Pacific Cities: Current Issues and Strategies

Lisa M. Benton and John Rennie Short (eds.), Environmental Discourse and Practice: A Reader

Philip Scranton (ed.), The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s

Barry Dalal–Clayton and David Dent, Knowledge of the Land: Land Resources Information and Its Use in Rural Development     

A Review of “Knowledge Externalities,Innovation Clusters and Regional Development”

Land use information over large areas is increasingly important for many studies related to environment in general and global change in particular. Yet there is a dearth of methodological knowledge in this area, especially regarding the practical task of producing land use maps. In this article, a systematic land use mapping approach is developed, based on land cover maps that in turn are produced through remote sensing. The concept is based on the recognition of varying strengths of land cover (LC) – land use (LU) relationships, from the thematic and spatial points of view. Several categories of relationships are identified, ranging from direct (case 1) to multiple/complex (case 4), and appropriate mapping strategies are discussed for these cases. Using a mapping study in Lebanon, it is shown that the principles embodied in this approach correspond to issues and conditions in real mapping situations. Finally, the concepts are translated into a series of steps through which the method can be applied to large areas, taking into consideration the specific requirements and constraints of each case. The final land use map represents an acceptable compromise between accuracy, level of detail, and cost.     

A Review of “Villages,Women and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: Making Place for Rural Development”

Conceptual advances for understanding the organization of family farms have not yet initiated parallel debates about how they might be aligned with the methods used to understand them. Customization of a novel research approach—farm life history—for an investigation of the socioeconomic organization of forty Australian farms responds to this literature gap. Individual farm life histories were initiated using farm tours (truck journeys) in which changes to the composition of land parcels prompted research conversations. The researcher and participants benefited from using motorized transport and traveling while talking, but the benefits were experienced unevenly across research encounters.     

A Review of “Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice”

Measured by growing student numbers and new programs, master's education is one of the most dynamic areas of U.S. higher education. We focus here on the current state of programs that award the master's as their highest degree, so-called master's only departments, a distinct institutional type in the United States, which has received little research attention. Focusing on sixty-four geography programs, considerable differences are apparent in terms of size (both student and faculty numbers), mission, and curriculum; this includes a number of new programs and hybrid degrees that have recently been developed. The findings raise questions about levels of program staffing, program structure, student recruiting, and overall program quality and viability. Given the changing nature of master's education, further attention should be focused on helping universities create, strengthen, and expand such programs in the future.     

A Review of “Mobilities and Health”

In this article, we examine graffiti abatement policies and programs in three West Coast U.S. cities: Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle. Through this analysis, several similarities in the graffiti abatement efforts of each city emerged. Since the 1990s, graffiti abatement efforts in these cities have become increasingly formalized and coordinated. By the early 2000s, the cities of Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle adopted zero-tolerance approaches toward handling graffiti and those caught making graffiti. City governments have placed increasing responsibility for cleaning up graffiti on private property onto property owners. Despite the increased coordination and effort, annual abatement estimates are hard to obtain because tracking spending on graffiti abatement across agencies and bureaus is difficult and often the cities do not comprehensively compile these data.     

A Review of “Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway”

Loblolly pines in Texas and Louisiana exhibit different reactions to moisture extremes, as indicated by the susceptibility of weakened individuals to attack by southern pine beetles. In Texas, intense insect outbreaks among pines occur during periods of extreme moisture surplus, whereas extreme moisture deficits render the Louisiana pines susceptible to attack. Intraspecies tree reponse to moisture extremes therefore appears to be spatially variable and partially dependent upon the frequency occurrence of severe climatic conditions.     

A Review of “Turf Wars: Discourse,Diversity, and the Politics of Place”

The spatial correlation, or colocation, of two or more variables is a fundamental issue in geographical analysis but has received much less attention than the spatial correlation of values within a single variable, or autocorrelation. A recent paper by Leslie and Kronenfeld (2011) contributes to spatial correlation analysis in its development of a colocation statistic for categorical data that is interpreted in the same way as a location quotient, a frequently used measure in human geography and other branches of regional analysis. Geographically weighted colocation measures for categorical data are further developed in this article by generalizing Leslie and Kronenfeld's global measure as well as specifying a local counterpart for each global statistic using two different types of spatial filters: fixed and adaptive. These geographically weighted colocation quotients are applied to the spatial distribution of housing types to demonstrate their utility and interpretation.     

A Review of “Geographies of Media and Communication”

Contemporary cartographic research on mapmaking and map use has a broad mandate and, as a consequence, researchers need a broad suite of methods. Consistent with research developments in other geographic subdisciplines, cartographic researchers now use qualitative methods. They offer the advantage of bringing research closer to the problem-solving realms of mapmakers and map users. Our purpose here is to discuss an array of qualitative methods for mapmaking and map use. Questionnaires, interviews, and protocol methods are used to gather verbal data about mapmaking and map use. Ethnographies produce data from direct observation of mapmakers and users. Maps also are sources for document analysis. We use examples of published cartographic research to elaborate on each of these methods.     

A Review of “India and South Asia: Economic Developments in the Age of Globalization”

Any analysis of health service problems facing the world today must consider that these problems exist in a geographic context. This fact has led to an increased need for accurate and current information to support emergency planning and decision making. In this article we combine geographic information systems (GIS) and neural networks for performing health emergency assessments and generating hazard maps that show areas that are potentially at high risk for emergencies. Through the use of neural networks we predict the location of future emergency events. On these events we use a kernel density estimator to create maps of areas that have a high risk for future emergencies. As a result, emergency services will know in advance where there is a high possibility of an emergency event occurring and can formulate a response, thus improving incident management and health planning. For example, the service can locate ambulances in places near the expected emergency cases, minimizing response time. The approach was tested in stroke-event analysis in the city of Athens, Greece.