Who moves into, out of and within London?

Summary Eight variables from the 1991 Census 2% Sample of Anonymised Records are used to classify Greater London's population into ten socio-demographic groups. This provides the basis for examining differences between 'types of people' in the extent to which they changed address in the year before the Census and whether they moved into, out of or within London.     

Urban investment and development corporations,new town development and China’s local state restructuring – the case of Songjiang new town,Shanghai

This article seeks to understand China’s new urban space production and associated state space rescaling through a microscopic investigation of urban investment and development corporations (UIDCs), based on a case study of Shanghai’s Songjiang New Town Development Corporation (SNTDC). It argues that the introduction of UIDCs as both developers and managers of designated urban regions is a creation of institutional reformation to accomplish customized place- and scale-specific spatial projects under the state strategy of new urban spatial development, playing an essential part in the rescaling of state space. UIDCs are economically independent of other social groups, politically bonded with the local government, and assume entrepreneurial and administrative functions within designated areas, acting as intermediary agents to enable local states greater capacity in governing new urban space production, engineering social change, and propelling economic development.     

Pastures of plenty?: Land rights and community-based agriculture in Peddie,a former homeland town in South Africa

The post-apartheid South African government has emphasized land reallocation in key national policy documents as a means to address apartheid-era legacies of poverty and inequality in the former homelands (black reserves). In this paper, a case study of the Masizame Community Garden Project in Peddie, a small former homeland town, explores the issue of group ownership rights of commonage for poverty alleviation purposes. Poor communication, commitment to gender empowerment and limited transparency of land application processes at different levels of government emerged as key issues that continue to frustrate attempts by local people to secure ownership rights of vacant municipal commonage to earn a livelihood.     

A Queer Country? A case study of the politics of gay/lesbian belonging in an Australian country town

The present paper examines the complex politics of gay/lesbian belonging through a case study of Daylesford, Victoria, an Australian country town. It contributes to two research bodies: gay/lesbian rural geographies and the politics of belonging. Daylesford hosts ChillOut, Australia's largest rural gay/lesbian festival, which provides a telling context for investigating gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We use qualitative data from the 2006 ChillOut Festival, including interviews with local residents, newspaper commentaries, and visitors’ surveys, to explore how Daylesford has been constructed, imagined, and experienced as a ‘unique’ site of gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We find that ChillOut crucially contributes to its wider reputation as a gay-friendly country town, but also, we argue, to the contested nature of gay/lesbian belonging. This was most powerfully demonstrated by the local council's refusal to fly the gay-identified rainbow flag on the Town Hall during the 2006 Festival and its subsequent banning of the display of all festival flags from that key public building. Because ChillOut was the catalyst for this protocol, the resolution was viewed as homophobic. Indeed, the homophobic and heterosexist rhetoric that ensued in the Letters to the Editor section of the local newspaper revealed some residents’ underlying antagonism towards ChillOut and the local gay/lesbian community. Moreover, appealing to a shared ‘Australian identity’ and associated normative ‘family values’, these letter writers deployed a multi-scalar politics of belonging, where a sense of gay/lesbian belonging to Daylesford at the local scale was contested by the assertion of a ‘more meaningful’ national scale of allegiance fashioned by heteronormativity.     

Left out? Observations on the RGS-IBG conference on social exclusion and the city

Summary On 29 October 1998, the RGS-IBG invited delegates to a conference entitled 'Social exclusion and the city', with Geoff Mulgan (founder of the think-tank Demos and a policy advisor to Prime Minister Blair) as the keynote speaker. The event was well attended, providing much useful insight into the government policies of the 'Social Exclusion Unit' and ongoing academic research into the processes and problems of 'social exclusion'. Here we provide some general observations on the conference and some suggestions regarding the possible directions of the debate on social exclusion and inclusion.     

Does the invisible hand have a green thumb? Incentives, linkages, and the creation of wealth out of industrial waste in Victorian England

'Loop closing', that is, the creation of waste recycling linkages between different industries, has been hailed as a means of simultaneously achieving improved economic and environmental performance. As a result of the widespread assumption that traditional market incentives and institutions are not conducive to such an outcome, however, there remains a fair amount of scepticism as to what the capacity of business self-interest to promote this behaviour actually is. This article challenges the dominant negative perspective by discussing by-product development in one of the most market-oriented societies in human history, Victorian England. Building on nineteenth and early twentieth century writings on the topic, as well as a more detailed analysis of the development of valuable by-products from highly problematic iron and coal gas production residuals, a case is made that the search for increased profitability within the context of private property rights often simultaneously promoted economic and environmental progress in the long run, as well as on different geographical scales.     

Africa’s middle class: building houses and constructing identities in the small town of Buea,Cameroon

Across Africa households are commissioning new domestic buildings for their own use or to rent out rather than waiting for governments to supply urban shelter. We conceptualize this as two interwoven processes: building houses for a new middle class and the building of a new middle class identity. We draw particular attention to the impact of international migration on these processes. The paper uses quantitative data from building permits and qualitative data from 29 interviews and walk-round tours with homeowners and government officials in Buea, Cameroon. Despite some significant caveats (related to housing the urban poor, regulating building standards, and lost local government revenue), we argue that these individually initiated building projects do a reasonable job of meeting local demand for shelter. However, from the perspective of identity-building these buildings are less successful. Whilst homeowners take considerable pride in their building projects, the statements that these structures make about their identities are not always “read” by their neighbours in the way owners hope. New housing is the lens through which Buea’s residents interpret growing levels of inequality and its associated social tensions.     

Beyond boundaries? Activism, academia, reflexivity and research

Summary In this paper, I draw on my own experiences to question some of the boundaries constructed around notions of activism and academia. Firstly, I introduce activism as a discursively produced concept with potential both to challenge and to support social exclusion. I propose an inclusive, reflexive view of activism that places us all as 'activists'. Using this understanding of activism and the work of feminist and other critical geographers, I consider the role of reflexivity within research and other activist projects. Drawing on my own experiences of activism, I then explore some of the boundaries that reproduce the academic-activist binary. I suggest such boundaries are actively constructed and may compromise the liberatory potential of academic research. I conclude the article by suggesting that a reflexivity grounded in the contingency of our lives can support activism within the academy and beyond.     

A Review of “Hazards,Vulnerability, and Environmental Justice”

A relatively simple modeling approach for estimating spatially distributed surface energy fluxes was applied to two small watersheds, one in a semi-arid climate region and one in a sub-humid region. This approach utilized a combination of ground-based meteorological data and remotely sensed data to estimate ‘instantaneous’ surface energy fluxes at the time of the satellite or aircraft overpasses. The spatial resolution in the watershed grid cells, which was on the order of 100-400 km, was selected to be compatible with ground measurements used for validation. The model estimates of surface energy fluxes compared well with ground-based measurements of surface flux (typically within approximately 40 Wm^?2). The model accuracy may be slightly less for bare soil surfaces due to an overestimation of the soil heat flux. In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of computing spatially distributed values of surface energy fluxes, these maps were used to qualitatively infer the dominant factors controlling the energy fluxes for the time period shortly following precipitation events in the basins. For the semi-arid watershed, values of sensible heat flux varied considerably over the watershed and displayed a pattern very similar to that of the spatially variable cumulative precipitation for at least one to eight days prior to the image acquisition. Due to the large fraction of exposed bare soil in a semi-arid ecosystem, even very small precipitation events had a strong influence on the pattern of sensible heat fluxes observed shortly after the event (less than 24 hours). For the sub-humid watershed, the fluxes tended to be more uniform across the watershed, and were influenced by a combination of precipitation total and land cover type.     

Urban resilience for whom,what, when,where, and why?

ABSTRACT

In academic and policy discourse, the concept of urban resilience is proliferating. Social theorists, especially human geographers, have rightfully criticized that the underlying politics of resilience have been ignored and stress the importance of asking “resilience of what, to what, and for whom?” This paper calls for careful consideration of not just resilience for whom and what, but also where, when, and why. A three-phase process is introduced to enable these “five Ws” to be negotiated collectively and to engender critical reflection on the politics of urban resilience as plans, initiatives, and projects are conceived, discussed, and implemented. Deployed through the hypothetical case of green infrastructure in Los Angeles, the paper concludes by illustrating how resilience planning trade-offs and decisions affect outcomes over space and time, often with significant implications for equity.     

WHAT'S IN A NAME? LINGUISTICS,GEOGRAPHY, AND TOPONYMS*

In differing ways, linguistics and geography each observes that a name's significance is connected to a society. According to lexical theory, a word is arbitrary: Its sound and meaning have no intrinsic link; its function is grammatical. Names are, however, special words. We bestow names based on how they sound or on what they may already have come to represent; names are not arbitrary. In turn, toponyms are special names, and as example we discuss a specific one, “New Orleans.” Far from an arbitrary pairing of form and meaning, this toponym reveals that names reflect the experience of the people who use them.     

Can community gardens and farmers' markets relieve food desert problems? A study of Edmonton,Canada

This article integrates community gardens and farmers' markets into a spatial analysis of food deserts in the City of Edmonton, Canada. Our results show that community gardens and farmers' markets can improve fresh food accessibility and help relieve food desert problems to some extent, especially for mature, inner-suburban neighborhoods. However, based on the minimum road network distance and high need indicators, four neighborhoods throughout the city can still be considered as food deserts even after farmers' markets and community gardens are taken into consideration. Regression results reveal that community gardens tend to cluster with supermarkets, so that neighborhoods that have poor access to supermarkets also tend to have limited access to community gardens.     

Who will leave? Oil,migration, and Scottish island youth

"Using survey data from high school students of Scotland's Shetland and Orkney Islands (affected by North Sea oil development), we explore relations between intentions to migrate and individual background, aspirations, and attitudes. Attitudes toward oil development do not predict migration intentions. Instead, migration intentions are predicted by essentially the same variables identified in other studies, in areas where energy development was not occurring. Thus, we found no evidence that oil development fundamentally changed young people's thoughts about leaving."     

A creativity-led rural renaissance? Amenity-led migration,the creative turn and the uneven development of rural Australia

This paper explores the relationships between amenity, creativity, internal migration processes and economic development in a significant proportion of rural Australia. In developing a predictive and synoptic model of migration attractiveness, we explore the extent to which rural regions and localities have been able to attract ‘creative’ human capital since 2001, the geographic distribution of such gains, and the extent to which ‘creative class’ presence is positively associated with business and employment growth. We find that ‘creative industry’ members find high amenity and high socio-economic status areas of rural Australia attractive places in which to live and work, yet this group's presence is not readily attributable to rural migration processes. Presence of the creative class, together with select rural amenity indicators, are powerful predictors of firm numbers but appear to have little influence over employment creation in rural Australia. Given these findings, the paper argues that building regional development policies around the attraction of the creative class is unlikely to yield major economic development gains.     

A paleolimnological record of rainfall and drought from East Java, Indonesia during the last 1,400?years

Variations in the location and strength of convection in the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP) have a profound impact on the distribution and amount of global rainfall. Much of the variability in WPWP convection is attributed to variations in the El Ni?o-Southern Oscillation, for which the long-term trends and forcing mechanisms remain poorly understood. Despite the importance of WPWP convection to global climate change, we have very few paleohydrological reconstructions from the region. Here we present a new paleolimnologic and paleohydrologic record spanning the past 1,400 years using a multi-proxy dataset from Lake Logung, located in East Java, Indonesia that provides insights into centennial-scale trends in warm pool hydrology. Organic matter δ¹³C data indicate that East Java became wetter over the last millennium until ca. 1800 Common Era (CE), consistent with evidence for the southward migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) during this time. Superimposed on this long-term trend are four decade- to century-scale droughts, inferred from organic matter δ¹³C and calcite abundance data. They are centered at 1030, 1550, 1830, and 1996 CE. The three more recent droughts correlate with hydrologic anomalies documented in other proxy records from the WPWP region on both sides of the equator, and the two most recent droughts correlate in time with historically documented periods of multiple, intense El Ni?o events. Thus, our record provides strong evidence that century-scale hydrologic variability in this region relates to changes in the Walker Circulation. Human activity within the lake catchment is apparent since 1860 CE.     

A Review of “Economic Geography: Places,Networks, and Flows”

Landing a rescue helicopter in a wilderness environment, such as Yosemite National Park, requires suitable areas that are flat, devoid of tree canopy, and not within close proximity to other hazards. The objective of this study was to identify helicopter landing areas that are most likely to exist based on available geographic data using two GIScience methods. The first approach produced an expert model that was derived from predefined feature constraints based on existing knowledge of helicopter landing area requirements (weighted overlay algorithm). The second model is derived using a machine learning technique (maximum entropy algorithm, Maxent) that derives feature constraints from existing presence-only points; that is, geographic one-class data. Both models yielded similar output and successfully classified test coordinates, but Maxent was more efficient and required no user-defined weighting that is typically subject to human bias or disagreement. The pros and cons of each approach are discussed and the comparison reveals important considerations for a variety of future land suitability studies, including ecological niche modeling. The conclusion is that the two approaches complement each other. Overall, we produced an effective geographic information system product to support the identification of suitable landing areas in emergent rescue situations. To our knowledge, this is the first GIScience study focused on estimating the location of landing zones for a search-and-rescue application.