Effects of Social Learning on Rural Farmers’ Adaptive Capacity: Empirical Insights from the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

Abstract

Environmental challenges in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta characterized by adverse impacts of climate change, upstream hydropower development and localized dyke expansion present imperatives for rural farmers to “learn to adapt.” However, little is known about how learning contributes to improving their capacity in adapting to these “wicked” problems. This study investigates potential effects of farmers’ learning on their adaptive capacity, utilizing nine focus group discussions, 33 interviews, and a structured survey of 300 farmers. The exploratory factor analysis produced two factors for social learning: (1) learning through social interactions and (2) self-reflection, and one factor for adaptive capacity. The regression results show that the social learning factors have significantly positive effects on adaptive capacity. Farmers with a higher level of social learning are likely to demonstrate higher adaptive capacity. The findings call for policy considerations to promote learning in a broader context of the delta to enhance local capacity.     

Strategic Positivism∗

Many “sociological”factors can account for the initial acceptance and continued persistence of W. M. Davis's Geographical Cycle. Such factors include Davis's attractive and forceful presentation of the cycle and the role of the cycle as a unifier of the discipline of physical geography, to name two. An analysis of the scientific character of the cycle, in the light of Karl Popper's criteria for demarcating between science and non-science, suggests that persistence of the cycle can also be attributed to a “logical”factor, the irrefutability of the central concept, stage.     

CIVIL SOCIETY PARTICIPATION IN THE DECENTRALISATION OF BRAZIL'S WATER RESOURCES: ASSESSING PARTICIPATION IN THREE STATES

Decentralisation, the transfer of powers to a lower level of government, is thought to encourage more efficient and equitable management of natural resources. Participation of civil society organisations (CSOs) is considered critical to create positive outcomes of decentralisation. Here we examine aspects of civil society participation in decentralised management using the case of Brazil's water resources management. Several Brazilian states have enacted reforms mandating watershed committees in which the participation of civil society is either encouraged or required. However, actual participation of civil society is not yet well understood. To assess participation, we collected qualitative data on watershed districts in three Brazilian states (Bahia, Paraná and São Paulo). Our findings reaffirm the importance of the state in establishing a transparent legal framework to encourage participation and in defining “civil society”. The ability of civil society leaders to obtain and deploy local environmental knowledge, which frames environmental issues in new geographical scales, is useful to achieve the efficiency and efficacy objectives of decentralisation. However, by “upscaling” political activities beyond decentralisation's new territories, CSOs could make decentralisation irrelevant to local environmental issues.     

Shrinking ‘Smart’?: Urban Redevelopment and Shrinkage in Youngstown,Ohio

Abstract

This article analyzes the impact of the much-heralded Youngstown 2010 Plan and the enacting of a program of “controlled” or “managed” shrinkage. It is argued that while the program of redevelopment has had an impact on Youngstown and its national image, it represents an exclusionary project that has centered on redeveloping downtown areas and neglected many city neighborhoods which continue to experience high levels of unemployment, vacancy, and crime. The analysis is situated in relation to the contemporary literature on “shrinking cities.” Youngstown's experience raises critical questions regarding the nature of the challenges facing shrinking cities, the constraints on actions available to them due to state and federal funding, and the coherence of the concept of “smart shrinkage.”     

The “Oldest River” As An Appalachian Popular Region

Abstract

Appalachia's New River was labeled “the second oldest river in the world” during the 1970s as part of a campaign to save the river from being dammed. Despite the absence of geomorphic evidence, the promotion of the superlative age of the river was so successful that the mythical label became reality in the minds of the region's populace. The “oldest river” thus became a popular or vernacular region, defined as one perceived to exist by its inhabitants. Sources of evidence for the current existence of the oldest river as a popular region include Internet references, which typically use the positive place image of the ancient stream to enhance the value of the river valley's attributes. Geography educators and students at all levels will benefit from class research projects aimed at identifying and understanding popular regions found near their educational institutions.     

MapStats for Kids: Making Geographic and Statistical Facts Available to Children

Abstract

Concern about the health of American democracy mounts as a result of the large body of literature documenting chronically low levels of voter turnout among young people in particular. A volunteer, nonprofit organization called “Kids Voting, USA” was formed in the late 1980s to try to tackle the specific problem of encouraging young adults to vote. In cooperation with school districts, the program includes some grade-specific curricula and culminates on Election Day with kids voting in polling booths set up alongside official ones. Existing assessments of the program's impact have been very positive. Particularly hopeful is one study that concludes that the program's strongest effects are found in mobilizing those least advantaged in terms of the customary correlates of political participation. Our ecological analysis, based on the actual turnout rates in the Kids Voting elections for participating schools in Erie County, NY (N = 222), suggests that such conclusions are perhaps overly optimistic. Patterns in the geography and social ecology of participation in Kids Voting elections unfortunately look quite similar to those related to variations in the official electoral process. Although Kids Voting programs may have a salutary effect stimulating political involvement among the young, further reforms seem necessary if they are to reach their full potential.     

Policy Boosterism,Policy Mobilities,and the Extrospective City

Abstract

This study develops the notion of “policy boosterism,” a subset of traditional branding and marketing activities that involves the active promotion of locally developed and/or locally successful policies, programs, or practices across wider geographical fields as well as to broader communities of interested peers. It is argued that policy boosterism is (1) an important element of how urban policy actors engage with global communities of professional peers and with local residents, and (2) a useful concept with which to interrogate and understand how policies and policy knowledge are mobilized among cities. A conceptualization of policy boosterism and its role in global-urban policymaking is developed by combining insights from the burgeoning “policy mobilities” literature with those of the longstanding literature on entrepreneurial city marketing. It is supported by illustrative examples of policy boosterism in Vancouver: the city's Greenest City and Green Capital initiatives, the use of the term “Vancouverism” among the city's urban design community, and demonstrations of new urban technologies during the 2010 Winter Olympics that were used to market a particular vision of the city's governance to people from elsewhere, but also—crucially—to local audiences. The article concludes by highlighting four foci that might frame future work at the intersections of policy boosterism and policy mobilities.     

Constructing Alterity in Ile De France?

Abstract

The aim of the article is to determine whether the Walt Disney Company has manufactured a landscape “other” to French culture around its parks in the Eastern Paris Basin. Val d'Europe is contentiously constructed by three main groups, not just one enterprise: the French state, the Walt Disney Company and local and regional governments, as well as by present and future residents, within the constraints of a contract based on French laws. The Company's investment has been a tremendous boost to the French state's project but did not lead to Disneyfication of the Briard landscape of agricultural lands in the Eastern Paris basin. In Val d'Europe the French state did not abdicate its authority in favor of commoditization of Paris as a global metropolis. The French state and French culture were never “weak” and overwhelmed.     

Data,dispossession, and Facebook: techno-imperialism and toponymy in gentrifying San Francisco

ABSTRACT

This article situates the 2015 rebranding of Zuckerberg San Francisco General within San Francisco’s technopolitical landscape. After Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the hospital, thereby acquiring naming rights, local toponymical tension percolated. This was in part due to Facebook’s gentrifying role in the city and the racial violence such processes constitute, as well as ongoing practices data colonialism. The latter includes Facebook’s attempt at pairing hospital data with user data in order to augment its scope into intimate and bodily geographies. In exploring the intertwining of gentrification and data colonialism, here I forge the concept of techno-imperialism as an analytic and as a point of departure in understanding Facebook’s multi-scalar impacts. As I suggest, the transformation of “The General” to “The Zuckerberg” indexes the company's techno-imperiality, as well as its efforts to mask its dispossessive impacts.     

GEOGRAPHY IN THREE WORLDS: HOW POPPER'S SYSTEM CAN HELP ELUCIDATE DICHOTOMIES AND CHANGES IN THE DISCIPLINE∗

Popper's concept of Worlds 1. 2, and 3 is discussed briefly in the light of idealism and materialism and to illustrate the debate about reification and reductionism. Then six types of change in geography are classified as changes in the phenomenal environment (World 1) and in that part of the behavioral environment that constitutes World 3. These changes involve those comparisons within or between “Worlds” that identify future research problems.     

Property advertising and the representational production of suburbia: “Functional suburbs” and “lifestyle suburbs” in Auckland

This paper joins literature on suburban advertising with Lefebvre's concept of representational space to analyse property advertisements as part of the representational production of suburban space. Based on comparative analysis of advertising material for suburban residential developments on Auckland's “North Shore” in two time‐periods—1950s and 2010s—the paper examines changes and continuities in thematic content. While property advertisements in the mid‐1900s emphasised the “functional suburb,” paying attention to attributes such as quality of utilities and proximity to the central city, more recently advertisements have more strongly emphasised the “lifestyle suburb,” with a focus on middle‐class community and natural amenity.     

Experiential Learning,Spatial Practice,and Critical Urban Geographies

Abstract

Experiential learning pedagogies are being adopted across undergraduate education and touted as an effective strategy for enhancing student learning. This paper develops an explanation for how and why such pedagogies can foster students' critical thinking and learning. Drawing on data collected from first-year students in “field based” urban geography courses at an urban university, I show how students' existing knowledge of urban spaces and specific parts of the city is constructed from a variety of sources and experiences, and can be incorporated in experiential learning activities in ways that foster critical learning. Such an approach is crucial to creating learning environments in higher education that include a greater diversity of student identities and life experiences.     

REVISITING RIO DE JANEIRO AND SÃO PAULO*

ABSTRACT. Contrasting models of urban development characterize the historical-geographical evolution of Brazil's two leading cities, viewed in an updating of the seminal 1933 article by Preston James. Native to Rio de Janeiro is a distinctive Luso-Brazilian style of irregular coastal urbanization, whereas SÃo Paulo displays a more uniform, modern type of inland commercial-industrial expansion. Even as Rio de Janeiro and SÃo Paulo sprawl today to form a virtual megalopolis in southeastern Brazil, they retain distinguishing roles in the national city system. Both metropolises are experiencing increasing functional decentralization and socioeconomic polarization, but in their own characteristic fashions. Generalized models of “Latin American city structure” are of limited value, unless they take into account such significant historical-geographical variations in urban form.     

The Council at Work

Abstract

The George J. Miller Award for Distinguished Service Committee has selected truly “A Person for all Seasons.” The recipient of this year's award favors the tropics, but has had rich experiences in the middle and high latitudes as well. The approach to geographic analysis which this year's recipient espouses has a rough but recognizable parallel in De Bello Gallico: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” (referring, obviously, to the recipient's A-V-T association). Although never a general—and here I presume Julius Caesar was—this person has chaired, ruled, flown, edited, directed, presided, superintended—and in each case earned a title appropriate to the service. But in two distributaries of endeavor where much of the time no formal title is granted, this year's award recipient has truly excelled: serving the profession and teaching students.     

POPPER'S PRINCIPLE OF FALSIFIABILITY AND THE IRREFUTABILITY OF THE DAVISIAN CYCLE

Many “sociological”factors can account for the initial acceptance and continued persistence of W. M. Davis's Geographical Cycle. Such factors include Davis's attractive and forceful presentation of the cycle and the role of the cycle as a unifier of the discipline of physical geography, to name two. An analysis of the scientific character of the cycle, in the light of Karl Popper's criteria for demarcating between science and non-science, suggests that persistence of the cycle can also be attributed to a “logical”factor, the irrefutability of the central concept, stage.     

Time out and Worlds Apart: Tradition and Modernity Meet in the Time‐Space of the Gravesweeping Festivals of Hong Kong

This paper focuses on Hong Kong's Gravesweeping Festivals, Qingming and Chongyang. The practices carried out in urban cemeteries at these Festivals are over two thousand years old, and represent “time out” from modern “clock time”. They are examined in the context of Giddens' (1985) reworking of Hägerstrand's time‐space geography, and of Douglas' (1966) discussion of pollution. It is suggested that the cemeteries are regarded as dangerous places because they represent liminal spaces. Giddens' dimension of span enables a distinction to be made between, on the one hand, the long‐established cultural significance of the grave, and, on the other, the recentness of the urban cemetery. The dimension of form(redefined from Giddens' original concept), applied to some details of cemetery landscapes, reveals the “worlds apart” of the non‐material worlds of the spirits and of fengshui. By considering the Festivals in the light of Giddens' dimension, character, it emerges that the Gravesweeping Festivals are, as they have been for centuries, firmly embedded in Hong Kong's social system, where routines of ancestor veneration continue to renew and strengthen the family bonds that are at the heart of Confucian values. Furthermore, their continued observation may well represent practices that are of deep ontological significance to the predominantly immigrant community of Hong Kong.     

Transformations of the Spatial Hegemony of the Courtyard in Post-Soviet St. Petersburg

Abstract

The courtyard is a space that existed before, during, and now after the Soviet period in Russian urban history. Noting the change in the courtyard's formerly hegemonic position on daily trajectories illustrates both Harvey's and Lefebvre's suggestions for uncovering the way that spaces articulate social values. A particularly revealing case study occurs in the struggle over including courtyards in a Chinese developer's project for a new multi-use district outside St. Petersburg. A brief history of the courtyard in Soviet planning allows subsequent analysis of the ways in which the city administration, the Chinese design team, and Russian planners deployed the courtyard as a spatial code for social meaning in design discussions. Examining the change in function and conceptualization of the courtyard shows how different groups in post-Soviet Russia seek to retain or redeploy concepts of the “collective” as they attempt to remake St. Petersburg as a successful “world” city.     

ECOLOGY AS METAPHOR: CARL SAUER AND HUMAN ECOLOGY*

Carl Sauer's writings contain material related to the general concept of “human ecology,”but he used the term infrequently and without emphasis and mainly as an analogy or metaphor.     

Evincing a Place for Place in Learning Progressions Research

This commentary is a response to Larsen and Harrington's article titled “Developing a Learning Progression for Place” (2018). Within the author focuses on the development of learning progressions in geography and future research directions.