The Dynamic Pathways of Agrarian Transformation in the Northeastern Thai–Lao Borderlands

ABSTRACT

Rural livelihoods in the northeastern Thai borderlands have moved away from being predominantly agrarian, yet farming remains a desirable alternative for many people. The empirical findings from fieldwork in a village in the northeastern Thai–Lao borderlands indicate how dependence on agriculture is determined by family contexts, such as land ownership, education level of household members, their gender and age. Cheap Lao labour and government price-support policies have enabled farmers to remain in production and diversify. Some educated rural people have successfully found employment opportunities outside the village as migratory wage labour, and are able to attain higher social status back in the village. Successful migrants have invested their earnings on cash-crop production and become rural entrepreneurs. Conversely, less educated migrants were unsuccessful in finding good jobs in the city and viewed agriculture as a more favourable alternative and valuable security. Geographical, cultural and economic specificities conditioned rural transformation and contributed to increasingly diverse and geographically extended livelihoods.     

A Review of “Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina”

Women's earnings, employment, and commutes have generally lagged men's. Geographers emphasize the effects of women's gender roles on their spatial entrapment as limiting their job opportunities and labor market status. This research methodologically advances spatial entrapment research by utilizing a national model of commuting with spatial fixed effects to make more accurate predictions and generalizations. Second, this research found that a control group of same-sex partners allows for more direct isolation and measurement of the gender role effect on women's commutes. This research concluded that women's gender roles are negatively affecting their commuting range and, therefore, their labor market status.     

A Review of “Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature,Technology, and the Sustainable City”

California sage scrub (CSS) is a highly threatened vegetation community in coastal Southern California, 90 percent of which has been lost. Understanding CSS recovery is critical to its survival. This study compares long-term effects of grazing, cultivation, and mechanical disturbance in Southern California by tracking the extent of exotic grassland in two valleys in the Santa Monica Mountains over sixty years using aerial image analysis. Native shrubs returned to the grazed valley over one and one-half times faster than they did in the cultivated valley. Cultivation might result in a type conversion of CSS to exotic annual grassland that resembles a new steady state.     

The Weavers of the “Western Isles”

This study provides an in-depth investigation of Turkish primary school students’ perceptions of geography. Gender differences in students’ perceptions of geography were investigated, including definitions of geography and its field of study. The findings showed that landforms, our geographical regions/Turkey, mapwork, and countries dominated among students’ definitions. Geography topics cited were mainly within the physical geography category and mostly those of landforms and cartography. A chi-square test revealed a statistically significant difference between girls and boys in the Turkey category and the history-related issues category.     

A Review of: “Urban and Regional Technology Planning: Planning Practice in the Global Knowledge Economy”

Haiti and other developing countries have increasingly turned to emigrant remittances as a potential source of development capital. There is a vigorous debate in the development community about the impacts of remittances, however, with concerns about dependence challenging the optimism about a potential new development engine. Based on interviews with forty-two remittance recipients in Haiti and forty-five corresponding senders in New York State, we find that the remittance economy in Haiti is indeed productive and has the potential to generate employment and other important development benefits. That said, there are important limitations created by broader political–economic conditions and deeply entrenched inequalities.     

A Review of “Putting “America” on the Map: The Story of the Most Important Graphic Document in the History of the United States”

Leinbach, Thomas R. and Brunn, Stanley D. (eds.) Worlds of E-Commerce: Economic, Geographical, and Social Dimensions

Calthorpe, Peter and Fulton, William The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl

Furuseth, Owen J. and Lapping, Mark B. (eds.) Contested Countryside: The Rural-Urban Fringe in North America

Sharp, Joanne P. Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity

Gleeson, Brendan and Low, Nicholas (eds.) Governing for the Environment: Global Problems, Ethics, and Democracy

Isenberg, Andrew The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750 – 1920

Albert, Donald P., Gesler, Wilbert M. and Levergood, Barbara (eds.) Spatial Analysis, GIS, and Remote Sensing Applications in the Health Sciences

Wright, Dawn J. and Bartlett, Darius J. (eds.) Marine and Coastal Geographical Information Systems

Jankowski, Piotr and Nyerges, Timothy Geographic Information Systems for Group Decision Making: Towards a Participatory Geographic Information Science

Gerber, Rod and Chuan, Goh Kim (eds.) Fieldwork in Geography: Reflections, Perspectives, and Actions

Craige, Betty Jean Eugene Odom: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist

Lowenthal, David George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation

Schroeder, Richard Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Practices in The Gambia

Lovell, W. George A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala

Lichtenberger, Elisabeth Austria: Society and Regions     

The “Cultural Turn” in the Classroom: Two Examples of Pedagogy and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

This article offers video lessons that interweave visual and written materials in order to introduce university undergraduates (who may or may not be geography majors) to some recent shifts in geographic inquiry. What is often described as the “cultural turn” in human geography invites us to examine more closely the politics of representation, whereby power relations animate the ever-unfolding construction of cultural identities. These examples of pedagogy explore the formulation of geographic knowledge about two cultural groups—the Maori and the Romany (a.k.a. Gypsies).     

The Disappearance of Dense Fog in Los Angeles: Another Urban Impact?

Incidences of dense fog have been gradually disappearing from large cities around the world. In Los Angeles, the climate records show that dense fog may become another extinct specie. In the last 50 years, dense fog has been reduced by about half at two, busy, coastal Los Angeles airports. Not one, but two factors, can be seen as possible causes. Both the downtown Los Angeles urban heat island and the city's air pollution clean-up show a significant relationship to decreasing fog. This study correlates monthly and annual dense fog data recorded at Los Angeles International and Long Beach International airports since the 1950s with downtown Los Angeles temperature and particulate air pollution data. The El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) values also explain interannual dense fog variability, with PDO showing a stronger relationship. Coastal sea surface temperatures also closely follow dense fog frequencies. Recent coastal cooling, since 1998, associated with a shift to the cool phase of PDO, has been associated with a rise in dense fog incidences.     

The geographical aspects of the substantiation for the development of the “Greater Irkutsk” agglomeration

An analysis is made of the geographical circumstances and factors of formation of a large urban agglomeration to unite the cities of Irkutsk, Angarsk and Shelekhov in the south of the Irkutsk region. The principles of delineating the agglomeration are formulated, which are used to single out different variants of the urban “Greater Irkutsk” agglomeration. A comparison is made of the characteristics of the agglomeration obtained in the different variants.     

A Review of: “Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life”

Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache

Foote, Kenneth E. Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy

Harries, Keith and Cheatwood, Derral The Geography of Execution: The Capital Punishment Quagmire in America

Larkham, Peter J. Conservation and the City

James, Preston E. and Martin, Geoffrey J. All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas

Meir, Avinoam As Nomadism Ends: The Israeli Bedouin of the Negev

Ruddick, Susan M. Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities

Smith, Neil The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City     

“Story-Networks” of Livestock and Climate Change: Actors,Their Artifacts,and the Shaping of Urban Print Media

Despite widespread media coverage of livestock-related issues and growing scientific evidence linking meat production and climate change, systematic content analysis of this relationship in media coverage has been surprisingly minimal. In this article, we combine actor-network theory with framing theory to develop the basis for “story-networks”—networks of actants and artifacts that shape how a media report or “story” is framed. We coded livestock-related articles from a major U.S. newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, over the 1999–2010 period to understand how various actants and artifacts shaped different story-networks. Just 5% of all livestock articles addressed connections with climate change; these articles focused on technology, lifestyle, or policy. Distinctive story-networks characterized each category, framing the livestock–climate change linkage as an issue to be addressed through either technological innovation, individual lifestyle choices, or policy action. In each story-network type, varying configurations of actants and artifacts were involved, including the cattle themselves.     

The impact of resolution on the accuracy of hydrologic data derived from DEMs

1 Introduction Automated extraction of drainage features from DEMs is an effective alternative to the tedious manual mapping from topographic maps. The derived hydrologic characteristics include stream-channel networks, delineation of catchment boundaries, catchment area, catchment length, stream-channel long profiles and stream order etc. Other important characteristics of river catchments, such as the stream-channel density, stream-channel bifurcation ratios, stream-channel order, number…     

A Review of “Urban Climate Change Crossroads”

This article examines the former location-based social medium Brightkite, over its three-year life span, based on the concept of natural cities. The term natural cities refers to spatially clustered geographic events, such as the agglomerated patches aggregated from individual social media users’ locations. We applied the head/tail division rule to derive natural cities, based on the fact that there are far more low-density areas than high-density areas on the Earth's surface. More specifically, we generated a triangulated irregular network, made up of individual unique user locations, and then categorized small triangles (smaller than an average) as natural cities for the United States (mainland) on a monthly basis. The concept of natural cities provides a powerful means to develop new insights into the evolution of real cities, because there are virtually no data available to track the history of cities across their entire life spans and at very fine spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, natural cities can act as a good proxy of real cities, in the sense of understanding underlying interactions, at a global level, rather than of predicting cities, at an individual level. Apart from the data produced and the contributed methods, we established new insights into the structure and dynamics of natural cities; for example, the idea that natural cities evolve in nonlinear manners at both spatial and temporal dimensions.     

Memento Mori: The “Death” of Youngtown

Youngtown, Arizona, was founded in 1954 as the nation's first retirement community, presaging the original Sun City (1960) and subsequent proliferation of active-adult communities across America. Youngtown, whose attractiveness waned owing to competition from more upscale, amenity-rich communities, suffered a fatal blow in 1998. Legal issues led to the loss of age restrictions, ushering in a swift and dramatic transformation of Youngtown from retirement enclave to working-class community, as Youngtown was overwhelmed by powerful social currents coursing through the Phoenix metropolitan region: explosive population growth, suburban sprawl, Latinization, and voracious demand for affordable housing. We tell the story of the life and death of Youngtown as a retirement haven, including the response of seniors to the loss in community identity: out-migration, anger, depression, and eventual acceptance among older people who linger. Insular, freeze-frame dreams of community identity and stability common among seniors in retirement enclaves ultimately prove chimerical in the face of urban change. The death of Youngtown as retiree haven, viewed in the sweep of shifting cultural attitudes about aging, may be a harbinger, the opening notes in a requiem for de jure retirement communities.     

A Review of “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World”

In contrast to the conventional gravity model that estimates flows between cities of given sizes, the reverse gravity model attempts to reconstruct the theoretical gravitational attractions of cities from network flow data. This article introduces the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method in solving the reverse gravity model. With comparison to the linear programming (LP) and the simplified algebraic method (SAM), the advantages of the PSO method include flexibility in the impedance function and better goodness of fit. The method is applied to the case study of air passenger transport in China. The results indicate that estimated nodal attractions in cities are generally in line with their population sizes, but there are significant discrepancies between them. A close examination of the discrepancies reveals that a better developed tertiary sector and higher tourism revenue per capita are associated with overestimated attractions in air transport, and stronger railway dominance influences their underestimation. The changes of gravitational attractions in major cities from 2001 to 2008 indicate the declining dominance of the largest cities and a move toward a more balanced development in the air transport system of China.