Reading Lanyu's tourism landscape: Hybridity and identity on Orchid Island,Taiwan

This article analyses the creation and implications for cultural identity of a hybrid tourism landscape on Taiwan's Orchid Island (Lanyu). It particularly argues that Lanyu's native Tao people have begun to gain a somewhat stronger cultural identity and autonomy through this landscape. Orchid Island underwent rapid modernization within the past 60 years. The article not only shows how tourism was imposed by Taiwan's government, but also how the Tao have made greater use of tourism's landscape over time for their own purposes. Not without sociocultural problems and contradictions, Lanyu's tourism landscape has been polysemic enough to allow for gradually improving relationships between Taiwanese and Tao and for gradually increasing Tao participation in modernity on their own terms.     

Spatial morphology of an Australian high street: a century of retail change in Subiaco town centre

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an empirical case study of the Subiaco town centre in Western Australia. The research method employs geospatial mapping of archival and contemporary data sources to explore the town centre's changing spatial structure and high street morphology at the micro-scale over the past century. Once a thriving retail and business centre, Subiaco's (and possibly the state's), premier retail high street destination is now being compromised as the disruptive influence of online retailing gains further traction in the marketplace. Retail disruption provides the paper's conceptual foundation. Agents of disruption include the processes of creative destruction and innovation diffusion, which together with macro-economic factors help to explain the centre's evolution over time and space. The paper examines changes in the town centre's morphological character including residential gentrification, a growing dominance of fast food outlets, an overabundance of comparison stores and a more gendered offering in retail and personal services establishments. The paper also refers to the potential of the town centre to regain its past residential status as a means of fostering economic growth and renewal and suggests that this will only be achieved with radical intervention at the policy and planning level.     

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AIZJOMI LANDSCAPE†

This article considers the history of a particular Latvian cultural landscape, located on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Known as an aizjomi landscape, it consists of small, humanly made tilths on the seashore. These features are both physical elements and repositories of historical and cultural meaning. In one sense, through hard labor humans created the aizjomi landscape, adjusting the morphological and dynamic elements of the landscape and continually maintaining them. These human efforts made agriculture possible in the dunes, and in so doing they fashioned a means for producing a livelihood and, indeed, for sustaining life. The aizjomi landscape became a materialization of the people's day‐to‐day life in the middle and late nineteenth century and can thus be considered a “taskscape,” pulsating simultaneously with the rhythm of nature and historical events. I have analyzed empirical evidence from archival documents, reviewed ecological and historical studies, and conducted field research on specific farming practices that shaped the landscape that, in turn, shaped agricultural activities. Through a retrospective analysis I trace the development and decline of the aizjomi landscape.     

Beyond the spectacle of property windfalls in Singapore: Lefebvrian spaces of home against profit-making

In Singapore, owners of private housing estates reaping windfalls through collective sales have been subject to the news media's sensational coverage of the topic. While collective sales will give rise to new developments that regenerate the country's landscape to reflect the image and identity of an entrepreneurial city, efforts to resist this wealth generating urbanism are subject to erasure. Instances of minority owners disinterested in profit-making using the courts to save their homes from the collective sale juggernaut are certainly emblematic of the inherent tension between one's home as housing and home as investment repository. Drawing upon ethnographical experiences from a housing estate built for public officials in Singapore, this article's use of the Lefebvrian theory of spatial production sheds light on how minority owners unmotivated by monetary windfalls (re)produce spaces of their homes that are overtly inimical to the impulses of majority owners to monetize their homes at high premiums.     

Smell this: Singapore's curry day and visceral citizenship

In August 2011, many Singaporean citizens grabbed their cooking pots and used the city‐state's national obsession with food to express growing dissatisfaction with immigration and integration trends. The ‘cook and share a pot of curry’ event—a local response to Chinese newcomers complaining about the smell of their Indian Singaporean neighbours’ food—is significant for its use of smell to catalyse a collective citizen reaction and for its reliance on contemporary social media. By analysing this event, we intend to (1) conceptualize the role of smell and viscera in framing citizenship; (2) understand how smells shed light on the city‐state's contemporary ethnic politics and sense of national identity; and (3) reframe the significance of curry day as an expression of visceral citizenship that complements how the state frames Singaporean citizenry. We maintain that curry day sheds light on a specific dimension of Singaporean citizenship, as it uses smell, viscera and embodied activism to mobilize against rationalistic state‐defined distinctions between local and international concerns, economic objectives and social cohesion, inter‐racial harmony and national identity.     

Cashing Out,Cashing In: Rural change on the south coast of Western Australia

Over the past century the cultural and physical landscape of the Shire of Denmark on the south coast of Western Australia has been transformed by successive waves of in-migrants. The paper examines the period since the early 1970s when alternative lifestylers and early retirees, attracted by the district's natural beauty and low land prices, began moving in and acquiring former Group Settlement holdings. The activities of these and subsequent 'alternatives' and 'cashed out' early retirees settling in the district have raised the marketability of the Shire's cultural capital. These changes have occurred in association with broader processes of rural restructuring and changing notions of 'rurality'. Increasingly, Denmark's cultural and physical landscape has become a highly marketable product for consumption by Perth's affluent middle classes. In recent years land prices have risen rapidly as speculators and financiers seek to 'cash in' on the 'cashed out' society. The paper explores these issues and relates them to broader processes of economic and social change occurring at the national and international levels.     

Sweet Auburn: Constructing Atlanta's Auburn Avenue as a Heritage Tourist Destination

Utilizing redevelopment plans created by Central Atlanta Progress, this study explores the process of constructing a heritage tourist landscape on Atlanta's Auburn Avenue. Once home to the wealthiest African American community in the United States, Auburn Avenue went through a period of economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2000, planners for the City of Atlanta focused on redeveloping the Auburn Avenue corridor. At that time, Central Atlanta Progress began to update plans to convert Auburn Avenue into the United States' premier African American tourist destination. Utilizing those plans, this article argues that the city's redevelopment vision ties into particular aspects of African American identity, which link to neoliberal economic policies in an effort to turn Auburn Avenue into a "culturetainment" district. This vision is juxtaposed against the reaction of community residents who seek an alternative redevelopment vision.     

Lacan on urban development and national identity in a global city: Integrated Resorts in Singapore

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been used in film, literature and other areas of social thought, but rarely in the domain of urban studies and human/cultural geography. Following its introduction by urban planners Michael Gunder and Jean Hillier, I apply the theory of the four discourses and the mirror stage of development to Singapore's urban development of the two Integrated Resorts at Marina Bay and Sentosa. The decision to allow gambling and build casinos was a contentious one and provides a point of departure for insight into the identity issues and planning decision making processes in Singapore. I critically analyse the rhetoric of the public debate from 2004–2005 to draw conclusions about the government's self‐perception of Singapore as a city‐state and the manifestation of this identity through the creation of cosmopolitan spaces as an attempt to project that identity onto its citizens. The aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to provide an understanding and recognition by analysis to enable a change of signifiers, values and ideology among the masters and the subjects to better represent the true needs and wants of the community. This reflective position enables a movement toward postcolonial urban studies and planning.     

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.     

线性抽样及分形理论在景观异质性研究中的应用

景观异质性是景观生态学研究的核心,对景观格局、动态和功能具有决定作用。将线性抽样与分形理论相结合的方法应用于景观空间异质性的表达中,相比于传统方法,可以定量表达景观类型在空间序列中的组合规律,而该组合规律可以作为指标来测度景观空间异质性的高低。景观类型在空间序列中的组合越复杂,则景观的空间异质性越高。该方法以景观类型空间序列的线形图像为基础,利用分形理论计算线形图像的分维,以分维数值的大小来表达景观空间异质性的高低。但样线的布设方法、分维计算方法以及景观分类系统的不同都会对分维数值产生影响。以妫水河流域为试验区,对该方法的适用性进行验证,结果表明,该方法可以有效表达景观空间异质性的高低。     

“HANDS ACROSS THE SEA”: THE MASONIC NETWORK,BRITISH IMPERIALISM,AND THE NORTH ATLANTIC WORLD

ABSTRACT. From Montreal to Madras, from Barbados to Burma, the lodges of Freemasons dotted the landscape of the British Empire from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. Together with the British grand lodges under whose authority they met, these lodges constituted a vast network that extended across the oceans and linked Freemasons in Britain's colonies to the metropole and to each other. In this article I use the fraternity to demonstrate how the age of empire can serve as a laboratory for studying transoceanic networks, institutions, and identities. Looking first at the broad imperial context, I demonstrate how the global Masonic network developed and describe its functions during the long nineteenth century. I then focus on the British North Atlantic as a case study of the brotherhood's role in connecting people on various sides of a particular ocean basin by offering practical services and encouraging an “imperialist” identity that helped consolidate the British Empire.     

Making Space for the Citizen in Geographic Education

Abstract

This article argues that we need to reconsider the connection between citizenship and geography. Although geographic education purports to prepare citizens, the possibilities for this relationship have been addressed by few scholars. The study shows that citizenship is situated in places and students’ actions as citizens reinscribe the meaning of these places. Because of this intersection, educators must be attentive to how they teach about places, particularly the ongoing interconnection between place and identity. One of the identities common in the teaching of places is citizenship. Geography instructors need to be thoughtful about their role as citizenship educators.     

‘A land history of men’: The intersection of geomorphology,culture and heritage in Cornwall,southwest England

Relationships between landscape-scale geomorphology and aspects of the human environment (including heritage and material cultures) are best examined in landscapes with a strong geomorphological imprint of past climatic and environmental changes, and where human activity has been present for a long period of time. In Cornwall, southwest England, a strong geomorphological signature is imparted by weathering of granite bedrock under cold Quaternary climates, and a strong cultural and heritage imprint is manifested in material and nonmaterial ways through archaeology, art, literature and folklore, and is illustrated in this paper through examples of Bodmin Moor (north Cornwall) and West Penwith (west Cornwall). Landscapes of Bodmin Moor include wide valleys with underfit rivers and upland summits with prominent tors, resulting from granite weathering and slope processes during the Tertiary and Quaternary. Pollen records show how human activity has changed on the moor over time, with a peak of settlement during the Bronze Age, and expansion of grazing into the Iron Age. Daphne du Maurier's novels, set on or adjacent to Bodmin Moor, emphasize the moor's relationship to unstable and intense human emotions and crises. In West Penwith, which is geomorphological similar to Bodmin Moor, geomorphology–culture relations are demonstrated in different ways but through a similar sense of place and regional identity. The St Ives School of early 20th Century art, including the local artist Peter Lanyon and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, draws inspiration from the local land and seascapes. The oral traditions and folklore of Zennor emphasize the importance of witchcraft and superstition that are in part founded on the wildness of upland summits and stormy coastline. Across West Penwith, tin mining and the mining trade exerted a strong impact on regional socioeconomic and cultural development from the Bronze Age until the end of the 19th Century, seen through settlement patterns, scientific innovation and Nonconformism. Today these geomorphology–culture relations are memorialized in the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site.     

"Here a Ghetto,There a Ghetto": The Value and Peril of Comparative Study

This commentary questions whether ethno-racial identities play no role in recent developments in France's banlieues, as Wacquant argues. Wacquant's point that the French banlieues should not be simple-mindedly equated with American "ghettos" is well taken. However, there is no doubt that ethno-racial identities are growing in political and social salience in France. There should be a way to conceptually take these developments into account, without interpreting them as mere replications of American racial politics. I argue that Wacquant overlooks the roles that partisan politics and public opinion will likely play in either assisting or hindering his proposed public policy changes. Change, whether incremental or revolutionary, will depend on the ideas and actions of party politicians and citizens. I also ask whether recent assertions of banlieue identity might be interpreted as somehow violating French core values.     

On The Waterfront: Globalization and Urbanization in Singapore

Although many cities aspire to "global-city status," few have been as explicit as Singapore in its quest to create urban landscapes to project its global aspirations. This paper presents the case of the Singapore River development zone as a "hyper-symbol" of Singapore's global urbanism. By creating a world-class riverfront not unlike the acclaimed waterfronts of London, Sydney, or San Francisco, Singapore's urban planners hope to project the city as a venue worthy of world-class tourism and leisure activities, an important node in international circuits of capital, and a vibrant city for both foreign visitors and local residents. Our paper, however, also argues that local forces and influences play a significant role in the waterfront's development. The Singapore River landscape is the negotiated outcome of both globalism and localism—a dialectical landscape formed by dominant global influences on the one hand, and emerging local processes on the other. Fieldwork comprising a questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews, and on-site observations provide evidence of such global-local interactions. The paper contends that the challenges at the river are symptomatic of the broader Singapore experience as the city-state grapples with issues of national identity, local empowerment, and community rights in the midst of a global convergence of tourists, capital, people, and cultures.     

城市新区作为“家”的表征与实践——以鄂尔多斯康巴什新区为例

本文基于表征与非表征的研究视角,分析了以鄂尔多斯康巴什为代表的中国城市新区作为“家”的表征与实践过程。研究发现：针对康巴什新区,外部媒介与地方政府以表征手段建构了截然不同的“家”的意象。其中,BBC、Times等外媒将康巴什新区描绘成充满荒凉景观的“鬼城”和不健康的中国城市居住空间,而在地方政府的重构中,康巴什新区则充满了生态栖居必备的城市景观并成为了先进的城市文化空间。而作为“家”中的居住者,康巴什居民“家”的营建经历了从陌生到认同的渐进过程,这一过程包含了日常生活实践中的空间转换与情感边界的构建。不同行动者共同塑造了康巴什新区多元的、充满矛盾意义的“家”的空间身份。本文旨在丰富中国快速城市化背景下“家”的地理学研究视角与类型,回应“鬼城”话语对地方政府主导的城市化“无家”的质疑,亦是城市新区社会文化研究的有益拓展与补充。     

Maintaining a sustainable economic base in rural towns: a case study of Leeton

Leeton, a town of 6000 in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, has in recent times suffered major economic upheaval. In 1993 the Letona Co‐operative stone fruit cannery, Leeton's masthead industry since 1921, was placed in receivership and closed after extensive search for a new investor in stone fruit processing failed. The removal of a substantial income stream from the local community has placed great stress on Leeton's economic and social fabric. However, the town in recent years has developed an economy that is no longer completely reliant on a narrow range of agricultural processing and service activities. Utilising factors of location, irrigation‐supported production flexibility and security, cheap land and utilities, and a stable and productive workforce, the combined efforts of the Leeton Shire Council, local community groups, the Riverina Development Board, and State Government departments have attracted a range of new industries to the town and shire over the past decade. It is these industries that will allow Leeton to survive the loss of Letona, sustain its economy and look to the future with confidence.     

Home-Work Links,Labor Markets,and the Construction of Place in Lawrence,Massachusetts, 1929–1939

This paper addresses the issue of how to combine, on one hand, the everyday links that are established and maintained between home and work, and on the other, the demand-driven social regulation of labor markets. It is argued that by taking an approach acknowledging the complexity of networks and the “constellations of relations” involved in forming local labor markets, we can better understand the meshing of divisions of labor at home and at work, in concert with the demands of local employers. In this respect, the roles of households, ethnic communities, and employers are taken to be critical and interdependent in forming local labor markets and, ultimately, constructing places. Census and archival data are used from Lawrence, Massachusetts to examine these issues through the situation of woolen mill workers of the 1920s and 1930s.     

CREATING NARRATIVES OF PLACE AND IDENTITY IN “LITTLE SWEDEN,U.S.A.”*

ABSTRACT. In Lindsborg, Kansas—“Little Sweden, U.S.A.”—the streets are lined with shops offering “An Adventure in Swedish Tradition,” and residents put on numerous festivals throughout the year highlighting Swedish folk customs. Such ethnic tourist towns have become increasingly widespread in the United States over the past thirty years. Tourists tend to perceive these places as towns where folk culture has been passed down unchanged for generations, while academics tend to dismiss residents' ethnicity as crass commercialism. Neither view is correct. Ethnicity and tradition are not static but constantly invented and reinvented. Modern folk ethnicity, among European Americans in particular, is simply the most recent incarnation of this process, one that attempts to recover ties to a specific, small‐scale landscape and history. This article explores the changing nature of the narratives of ethnicity and place‐based identity that the residents of Lindsborg have used to create a place for themselves in American society.     

古镇文化身份脆弱性的社会建构及其意义——多元话语分析模式的尝试

在建构主义研究范式的指导下选择多元话语分析方法,以江南水乡古镇周庄为案例地,对古镇文化身份的脆弱性进行社会建构分析。结果表明不同阶段政府旅游发展政策的改变、开发商的本质、传媒与专家系统的推力、游客凝视及对文化的态度、外来人群及其影响下原住居民的交往方式和价值取向共同建构了古镇文化身份脆弱性的形成过程。最后提出改造物质与生活环境、营建文化共同体、提倡理性交往等古镇文化身份脆弱性的治理对策,以期为文化遗产保护与可持续发展政策制定提供参考。