Putting together the pieces of the puzzle: Traces of New Zealand in international school geography textbooks

How does a fairly remote space (the islands of New Zealand) contribute to the development of geographical literacy in the geography textbooks of post‐socialist (Romania), Western (Germany) and post‐colonial (Mexico) countries? A four‐step analysis of three textbooks of international selection revealed different regionalisation cultures combined with traditional and recently implemented educational paradigms of geography education and led to a similar result. Despite the many ways in which New Zealand's geographical distinctiveness could be used to enhance geographical literacy, there are few operationalisations of educational targets that might contribute to sustainable long‐term learning. Further, these results also offer a possible explanation for the absence of the ‘southern lands’ on students' cognitive maps of the world.     

地理空间区位与开封兴衰变迁研究

在开封自南宋以来的变迁历程中,因中原地区地理空间区位形势所造成的频繁战患直接导致开封城市的破坏与衰落,更重要的是开封在黄河泛滥区中所处的地理中心位置,不仅使开封周边地区土壤严重沙化,而且还在堰塞其水运河道的同时,也使其失去了成为现代铁路交通枢纽的机会。区域环境因素发生的重要改变导致中原地区区域政治中心在建国初从开封迁离,而改革开放以后随着经济自由流动程度的加强,更多的发展资源向邻近的郑州集聚,也造成开封经济发展的弱势。但随着国家及河南省政府利用开封地理空间区位形势所实施的"郑汴一体化"等当代发展策略的介入,开封将改变长期以来形成的下降趋势而实现复兴与发展。     

Enacting immanent potentialities: Tcheb‐tchib strategies at the centre of the urban fringe in Nouakchott,Mauritania

The urban fringe areas of Nouakchott, the capital city of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, have become virtual epicentres of informal property speculation, as the state‐owned land that people illegally inhabit becomes an increasingly valuable commodity in the wake of urban redevelopment plans and vast infrastructural development projects. By applying ingenious ‘poaching’ strategies based on anticipation, the marginalized, impoverished people inhabiting these areas appropriate and manipulate space in order to survive. In their attempt to counter the state's technologies of governance through what is commonly known as tcheb‐tchib, a form of creative improvisation, they become a driving force in the dynamic and contested reconfigurations of the urban landscape. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the strategies of former nomads who are now sedentarized on the urban fringe, this article conceives large‐scale urban renewal as a dynamic process that generates an emergent space of immanent potentiality that the urban poor attempt to strategically appropriate and enact to make the most of a potentially destructive process.     

Islam in Sydney: Contesting the Discourse of Absence

Non‐recognition is one of the key modes of re‐inscribing the Other. In Sydney's anti‐mosque politics this form of oppression was manifest as a discourse of absence. Sydney Muslims have been portrayed as non‐existent within, or external to, localities where mosques have been proposed. In these circumstances claims to belonging and citizenship by Sydney Muslims have been fundamentally injured. Census data are used to challenge the historical and contemporary constructions of Islamic absence in Australia. Sydney Muslims are a culturally diverse and somewhat disparate faith group. They are increasingly present in areas outside of the initial zones of residential focus. This diversity and dynamism is a substantial challenge for Islamic community building (Ummah) in Sydney and presents rich foci for further research.     

Creating and sustaining Islamic financial centers: Bahrain in the wake of financial and political crises

Although primarily concentrated in countries with Muslim majorities, Islamic finance has become a global industry representing both a decentering of the global financial architecture and the emergence of an urban network that resides beyond the confines of traditional world city literature. While geographers have identified the “Mecca’s” of the Islamic finance industry – one of which is Bahrain – there remains a need to identify the factors necessary to create and sustain centers of Islamic finance. This paper examines these factors through a firm-level survey of foreign and local Islamic financial institutions in Bahrain, in conjunction with key informant interviews with representatives of these firms. We find that while Bahrain’s entrenched institutional advantages have preserved its role as a center in the Islamic financial landscape, ongoing political instability and the increasing attractiveness of new and emerging centers are threatening this role. As the country navigates the current social and political unrest, questions are raised as to what it takes to be an Islamic financial center.     

低碳视角下城市空间形态紧凑度研究

全球气候变化背景下,构建功能紧凑的低碳城市空间形态已成为世界各地城市实现低碳化可持续发展的主要途径之一。但目前的城市形态研究主要集中在城市外部空间,缺乏对城市内部功能空间紧凑度的量化。从实现低碳城市的视角,提出了城市内部功能空间形态紧凑度的量化指标,用以探讨实现低碳城市的城市空间形态特征;以商业、医疗、教育和文化娱乐等4种重要服务设施布局为基础,构建了城市功能空间紧凑度指数,对不同规模、不同地理条件类型的8个案例城市进行定量研究,实证了城市内部“功能空间紧凑度”指标较城市外部“形态紧凑度”指标能够更好的反映城市形态的紧凑性内涵,适用于评价各类城市空间形态的低碳发展模式。     

‘Here,we don't just trade goods,we also “sell” people's lives’: Sari‐sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance in a Philippine fishing community

Home‐based neighbourhood stores (locally known in the Philippines as sari‐sari stores) are a ubiquitous feature of most Philippine communities. They are small to medium‐size trade stores not unlike convenience stores in the West where people buy goods in small quantities. In the Philippines, these stores play a vital role in providing everyday economic sustenance to low‐income communities. But more than an economic hub, sari‐sari stores also function as a social hub that connects people and acts as eyes and ears of the community through the people who make use of their services. In a sense, sari‐sari stores are the community's ‘myopticon’ where people's day‐to‐day dealings with everyone in the community and its environs are reported and discursively brought under the gaze of the ‘entire community’. Being myopticon as opposed to Foucault's panopticon, surveillance in sari‐sari stores is partial, non‐hierarchicalized and could be resisted by people in the community. Nonetheless, regardless of the ‘myoptic’ features of sari‐sari stores, their presence in the community ‘interpellates’ everyone's daily existence and instantiates a discursive space from which a structure of informal social control is enacted among community members. Sari‐sari stores then are an important reminder of how our built environment is also about contestation and negotiation of everyday life as we make use of space and as the architectonics of space both constrain and empower our manoeuvring in places.     

Managing the Murray‐Darling Basin

Within the Murray‐Darling Basin lie Australia's most important water and land resources as well as some of the country's most serious resource management problems. This paper summarises the importance of the resource‐based industries, especially agriculture. The major agricultural and water resource problems are outlined, with most attention being paid to salinity. Critical to the problems and their solution are the institutional arrangements for the management of this large interstate river basin. The River Murray Waters Agreement, dating from 1914, has had limited success in tackling the basin's problems, because of its limited geographical and functional scope, especially in the area of water quality. The growing severity of the latter problems, especially salinity, resulted in the 1987 signing of the Murray‐Darling Basin Agreement to promote and coordinate the management of the basin's water, land and environmental resources. As it is concerned with the basin as a whole, its success is dependent on the full cooperation of the Commonwealth and three state governments involved.     

HYPHENATED GEOGRAPHIES: THE DEINDUSTRIALIZATION OF NATURE‐SOCIETY GEOGRAPHY*

As visions of ecological crisis mark the daily headlines, industrial spaces of intensive energy and material consumption become a more intense object of political and social concern. In this article, I attempt to situate geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism within the context of the history of geographical thought. I argue that the ways in which geographers read the hyphen in the phrase “nature‐society” reveals epistemological limits to their object of study. I then offer three dramatically different readings of the hyphen and discuss how they have affected the lineages and trajectories of geographical research—Barrows's human ecology, Sauer's cultural landscape, and critical theories of social nature. I conclude by suggesting that geography needs to let go of its empirical and conceptual fixation on “nature”.     

The Geography and Area Studies Interface from the Second World War to the Cold War

Disciplinary geography's history represents an important source for contemporary debates over the status of geographical knowledge across the social sciences. This article argues for a reorientation of geography's history by examining its interface with the development of area studies in the United States. It investigates the epistemological and institutional transformations that occurred in the decades before and after the Second World War as the regional concept transmuted into area studies. The article finds that although geography's regional concept shaped the spatial constructions of area studies, the latter's imaginative geographies fixed the regional concept along geopolitical visions of the nation‐state and Cold War regional blocs that continue to occlude social scientific attempts to redraw the borders of the world.     

WATER RESOURCES OF THE CHUNCHUCMIL MAYA*

ABSTRACT. Chunchucmil, on the Yucatán Peninsula, was densely populated in the Maya Late Classic period (ca. a.d. 550–830), even though it depends principally on groundwater. In the 1990s, hydrologic investigations were conducted to determine whether groundwater could have met domestic and agricultural needs. The region's groundwater is near the surface and is influenced by sea‐level fluctuations; however, geochemical analysis revealed that groundwater quality is not affected by mixing with seawater. The potential exists for high and spatially extensive nitrate contamination in this karstic area, yet water‐quality analyses revealed only moderate levels of nitrate in the groundwater. Agricultural limitations are imposed by chloride, total dissolved solids, and salinity, as indicated by electrical conductivity; domestic water use is limited by the presence of nitrate, sulfate, and chloride. Throughflow in the ring of cenotes (sinkholes) around the Chicxulub impact crater may explain the movement and spatial distribution of water‐quality constituents in Chunchucmil's groundwater.     

On Geographic and geography

New Zealand Geographic is one of a number of geographical magazines published in the English‐speaking world that make little or no reference to work by academic geographers. It recently launched a New Zealand Geographic Trust to promote research into ‘New Zealand's life, culture and sciences’ and collaborated with four other publishers of geographical magazines to raise awareness of climate change: the work of academic geographers is again ignored. This exclusion of academic and school geography from such enterprises raises important issues regarding the discipline's public profile in New Zealand and suggests the need for greater public engagement activity by the country's geographers.     

Forestry as imperial careering: New Zealand as the end and edge of empire in the 1920s–1940s

Forestry is interestingly situated within British imperial networks of the 19th and early 20th centuries whereby India was arguably the main node. Drawing on Lambert and Lester's concept of ‘imperial careering’ as a way of exploring imperial networks, this paper further extends its application to foresters as a group of middle‐level technical experts as well as carrying it into the 20th century when the British Empire was by some measures at its zenith. The forestry careers of Owen Jones and Hugh Corbin, principally in Australia and New Zealand, are used to illustrate the discussion which concludes with some more general observations about imperial careerists.     

OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM: A MILITARY GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE*

ABSTRACT. The war in Iraq has spanned the full spectrum of military operations: intense combat, stability‐and‐support operations, and peacetime activities. Regardless of their nature and relative intensity, military operations are shaped by the characteristics of the military operating environment. Consequently, the scale, tempo, and complexity of any type of military endeavor are linked to the physical and cultural landscapes of the region in which it is conducted. Military geographers use geographical information, tools, and techniques to examine those links. Iraq's operating environment is studied to identify the relevant components of its physical and human geography. This military geographical examination of Iraq tells us a great deal about how the physical and cultural environment have influenced the war, as well as how the complexity of its human landscape continues to affect the postwar rebuilding of the country.     

The political economy and geopolitical context of India's economic crisis, 1990–91

The Indian economy suffered a balance of payment crisis in 1991, which provided the context for the rolling out of neoliberal policies, also referred to as the New Economic Policy in India. This paper examines the national and global causes and context of India's economic crisis and adoption of neoliberal policies. While grounding my analysis in historical‐geographical materialism, I argue that India's economic crisis was a product of certain contingent conditions. I draw attention to India's pre‐neoliberal economic regime and analyse how the earlier‐established relationship between revenue generation and expenditure ran into trouble; what changes occurred in the organization and management of revenues and capital; nature of interventions of the state in the circulation of capital; changes in the physical aspects of circulation of commodities, together with foreign trade and the formation of the ‘world market’; and the rise of the United States as the only global superpower. I conclude that India's economic crisis of 1990–91, and the neoliberal policies that followed, are products of contingent historical and geographical conditions. A teleological approach towards examining global capitalism and production of economic crisis often neglect such contingencies and provide a set of causalities that may, at best, be classified as incomplete.     

Fieldwork and Tropicality in French Indochina: Reflections on Pierre Gourou's Les Paysans Du Delta Tonkinois, 1936

This paper examines the fieldwork undertaken by the distinguished French geographer Pierre Gourou (1900–99) in the Tonkin Delta (Red River Delta) of northern Vietnam in the 1920s and 1930s, and his wider configuration of “the tropical world” as a distinct space of knowledge and radical otherness. Gourou's fieldwork endeavours in French Indochina are interpreted in the light of recent work on “tropicality”: the idea that “the tropics” need to be understood as a western cultural construction and colonising discourse that essentialised the hot, wet regions of the world, and exalted the temperate world over its tropical counterpart. The paper focuses on Gourou's monumental 1936 study Les paysans du delta tonkinois, étude de géographie humaine. It is argued that in this study, and his later comparative work on the tropics, Gourou elaborated a distinct geographical variant of tropicality, but one that, ultimately, reinforced the essentialist logic and momentum of this discourse. Particular attention is paid to the geographical ideas, fieldwork techniques and discursive strategies that Gourou used in his 1936 study, and the French colonial context in which he worked. The article shows how Gourou appealed to western reason and science as tools of study, identified overpopulation as the key problem facing the Tonkin Delta, and suggested that colonial practices of modernisation had a limited place and ineffectual role in the rice plains of the region.     

The Uneven Landscape of California's Historical Landmarks

Historical markers help preserve and display history and communicate what a group deems important about a place's past. This paper analyzes the changing themes and landscape relevance of California's official historical landmarks. California's thousand‐plus markers are classified and mapped by themes, analyzed for changing topical emphasis over time, and evaluated for landscape presence. The thematic distribution and relative density of these landmarks is uneven. Gold Rush and Spanish themes have become less prevalent over time as culturally related landmarks have grown in importance. This paper illustrates how historical landmark programs help sustain and define the public's collective memory through designating dispersed geographical locations as particularly important points of reference to the past.     

物联网时代信息地理研究的思考

近年来物联网在全球掀起巨大热潮。作为新一代信息技术,物联网不仅将给生产运行、经济和社会管理乃至个人生活带来极大影响,同时将会给地理学带来深刻变化,成为信息地理研究的重要对象。深入分析物联网对于地理学核心概念以及信息地理研究方法带来的影响,构建物联网时代信息地理研究的理论框架,主要包括:物联网构造了新的地理空间--现实地理空间与虚拟空间的统一体,推动人地关系的改善;物联网时代的信息实时收集与处理特征,使得空间结构、产品空间、行为空间发生重要变化,信息作为区位的影响因素将得到增强,城市交通、居住、工作和休憩功能空间受到影响,物联网从规范产业链和改变消费行为两个方面影响商业模式,人的环境感应能力增强,影响人们的空间感知和空间行为;基于物理世界的海量实时数据,信息地理研究方法发生变化,实证、时间维度、微观尺度等方面的研究将会增强。进而,系统性提出物联网时代信息地理的主要研究内容。     

THE PANOPTICON'S CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT. Over the past two centuries, surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham's Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell's Big Brother; today, an electronic human‐tracking service. Functionally, each technology provided total surveillance within the confines of its designated geographical coverage, but costs, geographical coverage, and benefits have changed dramatically through time. In less than a decade, costs have plummeted from hundreds of thousands of dollars per watched person per year for analog surveillance or tens of thousands of dollars for incarceration to mere hundreds of dollars for electronic human‐tracking systems. Simultaneously, benefits to those being watched have increased enormously, so that individual and public resistence are minimized. The end result is a fertile new field of investigation for surveillance studies involving an endless variety of power relationships. Our literal, empirical approach to panopticism has yielded insights that might have been less obvious under the metaphorical approach that has dominated recent scholarly discourse. We conclude that both approaches—literal and metaphorical—are essential to understand what promises to be the greatest instrument of social change arising from the Information Revolution. We urge public and scholarly debate—local, national, and global—on this grand social experiment that has already begun without forethought.     

滇藏川毗连地区藏传佛教寺院分布的教派地域分异研究

藏传佛教寺院作为藏区独具特色的宗教景观而成为宗教地理学的研究热点之一,其不同教派寺院的空间分异格局是反映藏传佛教不同教派势力时空扩散过程的重要载体.着眼于滇藏川毗连地区,以四大教派寺院空间分异为视角,探讨藏传佛教寺院的地域分异特性及其历史形成机理.研究表明:滇藏川毗连地区藏传佛教四大教派寺院集中分布,但集中程度与集中地域各自不同,其寺院盲区范围及分布也不尽相同;宁玛派、萨迦派寺院与噶举派、格鲁派寺院呈金沙江东西两岸悬殊较大的分异格局;噶举派与格鲁派寺院数量上呈高度负相关.这些地域分异特性是滇藏川毗连地区的区域地理环境、不同教派主寺的分布以及藏传佛教四大教派传播扩散过程中教派间的斗争、土司的态度等多因子综合作用的结果.