Optical and radar remote sensing data for forest cover mapping in Peninsular Malaysia

This study aims to map forest cover in Peninsular Malaysia using satellite images as deforestation is of concern in the recent decades, and is an important environmental issue for the future too. The Carnegie Landsat Analysis System‐Lite (CLASlite) program was used in this study to detect forest cover in Peninsular Malaysia using Landsat satellite data. The results of the study show that CLASlite algorithm misclassified some oil palm, rubber and urban areas as forest vegetation. A reliable forest cover map was produced by first combining Landsat and ALOS PALSAR images to identify oil palm, rubber and urban areas, and then subsequently removing them. The HH and HV polarization data of ALOS PALSAR (threshold method) could detect oil palm plantations with 85.26 per cent of overall accuracy. For urban area detection, Enhance Build up Index (EBBI) using spectral bands from Landsat provided higher overall accuracy of 94 per cent. These methods produced a forest cover reading of 5 914 421 ha with an overall classification accuracy of 94.5 per cent. The forest cover (including rubber areas) detected in this study is 0.38 per cent higher than the percentage of 2010 forest cover detected by the Forestry Department of Peninsular Malaysia. The technique described in this paper presents an alternative and viable approach for updating forest cover maps in Malaysia.     

Policy narratives, landholder engagement, and oil palm expansion on the Malaysian and Indonesian frontiers

Over recent decades a structural transformation has affected agriculture in the frontier areas of Malaysian Borneo and Outer Island Indonesia with the rapid conversion of agricultural lands, fallows, and formerly forested areas into oil palm. These frontiers have similar positions in the international political economy of oil palm and have complementary resource endowments. In both cases, state planners face the common challenges of finding a disciplined labour force, delivering land for estate development, maintaining local legitimacy, and dealing with local contestation. Yet there are significant differences in systems of governance and policy frameworks regarding land, shifting capacity of state actors to facilitate the transformation of these agrarian frontiers, and changing degrees of local, national and international contestation. Considering the generic and the specific elements at play in each case, this paper argues that analogous policy narratives have shaped the ways in which landholders have been engaged in the process of oil palm expansion in Malaysia and Indonesia. In both cases, with the shift from state-led to neoliberal governance approaches to agricultural development, the 'frontier' has been created and transformed through policy narratives that facilitate the conversion of whole landscapes into oil palm. This has been achieved by obscuring indigenous forms of agriculture and land tenure, while creating reserves of available 'state' or 'idle' customary land, and counterpoising smallholder 'marginality' and 'backwardness' to the modernity of contemporary estate agriculture.     

世界油棕生产贸易的时空格局演变及发展预测

油棕是世界上单位面积产量最高的一种木本油料作物,有“世界油王”之称。它的产量和贸
易量比重在植物油料中居世界第一,经济效益巨大。本文从世界油棕的起源与地理扩散入手,对近
年来世界油棕的生产贸易现状作了分析,结果表明：油棕起源于非洲,扩散到亚非拉广大热带地
区,目前形成中西非、东南亚、中南美三大产区和印、中、欧盟等十大消费地的基本格局。在此基础
上,对油棕生产贸易的发展趋势作了预测,一是种植面积和油棕消费市场将会继续增长;二是新科
技助力油棕的增产;三是油棕的可持续利用必将进一步加强。     

Carbon stock of oil palm plantations and tropical forests in Malaysia: A review

In Malaysia, the main land change process is the establishment of oil palm plantations on logged‐over forests and areas used for shifting cultivation, which is the traditional farming system. While standing carbon stocks of old‐growth forest have been the focus of many studies, this is less the case for Malaysian fallow systems and oil palm plantations. Here, we collate and analyse Malaysian datasets on total carbon stocks for both above‐ and below‐ground biomass. We review the current knowledge on standing carbon stocks of 1) different forest ecosystems, 2) areas subject to shifting cultivation (fallow forests) and 3) oil palm plantations. The forest ecosystems are classified by successional stage and edaphic conditions and represent samples along a forest succession continuum spanning pioneer species in shifting cultivation fallows to climax vegetation in old‐growth forests. Total carbon stocks in tropical forests range from 4 to 384 Mg C/ha, significantly wider than the range of total carbon stocks of oil palm plantations, 2 to 60 Mg C/ha. Conversion of old‐growth forest areas to oil palm plantations leads to substantial reduction in carbon storage, while conversion of forest fallows to oil palm plantations may sustain or even increase the standing carbon stock.     

Immigrant city,global city? Advantage and disadvantage among communities from Asia in Sydney

This paper examines the patterns of residential concentration and dispersion and the socio‐economic profiles of major immigrant groups from Asia in Sydney at the 1991 Census, taken soon after the largest immigrant boom in Sydney's urban history, which occurred between 1986 and 1988. It makes use of detailed birthplace, language and religion cross‐tabulations by area and socio‐economic indicators, as well as four‐digit occupational data from the Census. It then tests to what extent immigration flows from different parts of Asia have been linked to Sydney's emergence as a global city, and whether the disadvantage or advantage associated with the settlement of some communities is tied to restructuring, globalisation, language difficulties, residential concentration, or other factors.     

Ethnic Place Identity Within A Parisian Neighborhood

The Goutte d'Or neighborhood of Paris has long been seen as an impoverished yet colorful quarter of the city. In recent years, it has also developed a reputation as a center for immigrants. Three populations now share the neighborhood: the European French, the Maghrebi immigrant population and their children, and the newest population of migrants from former Francophone colonies. This paper examines how the Goutte d'Or's social and ethnic identity is revealed in the built environment and in its social and economic activity. This neighborhood demonstrates how different communities and place identities coexist. It also shows how global networks of migration, exchange, and visits infuse local places. The Goutte d'Or distills many aspects of French immigrant identities, providing an example for increasing numbers of immigrant neighborhoods in France and across the world.     

中国石化产业空间组织的演进历程与机制

本文研究了中国石化产业空间组织的演进及格局,探讨了其影响因子及作用机制。研究认为,中国石化产业空间组织经历了内陆分散布局、沿海局部快速集聚及沿海全面加速扩张三个阶段。经过60年发展,中国已形成了“十大石化产业基地”.原材料、市场和政策因素是影响中国石化产业空间组织的三大主导因素,各因素在不同阶段的作用强度存在差异。在石化产业发展的早期,原材料是影响石化产业布局的主要因素,在此因素的影响下,中国石化产业主要布局在原油丰富的东北和西北地区。改革开放以来,随着工业化和城市化进程的加快,市场成为影响石化产业空间布局的主导因素,中国石化产业开始向沿海局部地区布局。2000年以来,在原材料、市场、政策等多种因素驱动下,石化产业加速向沿海地区集聚,沿海石化产业带初步形成,无序扩张态势初现端倪。     

中国大城市外国人聚居区的形成机制——基于北上广的比较研究

在3个典型的外国人聚居区——北京望京韩国人聚居区、上海古北日本人聚居区、广州小北非洲人聚居区的实证研究基础上,探讨不同移民群体的城市选择偏好,以及移民群体和城市之间的互动关系。研究发现,在京韩国人以企业、商贸、教育指向型居多,在沪日本人以企业指向型为主,在穗非洲人以贸易指向型为主,这一特征说明北上广不同的城市职能差异;北上广的外国人聚居区均形成于相似的宏观制度环境,生产活动的全球性重组、国家间关系、国家制度和外国人管理政策等因素共同影响了外国人聚居区在大城市的兴起,但由于不同的城市软硬件环境与在华外国人的身份属性互动影响,也形成了各具特色的外国人聚居区,概括为耦合型（北京望京）、特区型（上海古北）和族裔型（广州小北）。中国城市的国际化已进入引资（资本国际化）和引人（人口国际化）并进的新阶段,应当进一步重视对大城市外国人聚居区的治理及服务的引导、规范,发挥其示范带动作用,推动中国对外开放深度高质量发展。     

Bridging the knowledge divide between public and experts using PGIS for land use planning in Malaysia

Ineffective public participation in land-use planning contributes to the lack of communication and understanding between the public and experts, acting as a barrier to successful planning outcomes. In this study, we assess whether Participatory GIS (PGIS) is a suitable method to bridge the communication gap between the public and expert knowledge for planning in the developing country context of Malaysia. Through a mixed methods approach, we investigate whether expert knowledge converges or diverges with the public's perceived knowledge obtained through a PGIS process and assess the potential benefits of PGIS from public and expert planning perspectives. The results indicate more convergence than divergence in knowledge and perspective, indicating that a PGIS process can communicate local knowledge to planning authorities to inform land use and development planning in Malaysia. Both the public and planning experts recognize the potential benefits of PGIS, but successful implementation will require major changes in traditional Malaysian public participation processes.     

Globalisation, State Regulation and Industrial Upgrading of the Oil Seed Industries in Malaysia and Brazil

Palm oil from Malaysia and soybean meal from Brazil are of major importance in the world market. State regulation in both countries has played a crucial role in agro-industrial upgrading, i.e. the establishment, consolidation and diversification of manufacturing capacity in the oil seed chains. In particular, sufficient volumes of raw materials for local processing have been secured through systems of differential export taxes. This core set of regulatory mechanisms has been used in both countries, despite structural differences between the two chains related to the properties of the crops (oil palms and soybeans), the previous organisation of agricultural production, and the size and nature of the local markets. Globalisation in its present neoliberal form, institutionalised within the World Trade Organisation, gradually erodes the opportunity for other developing country states to upgrade agro-industries by adapting similar forms of regulatory mechanisms.     

Resource utilization and regional planning information systems (RURPIS) in Botswana

Abstract

Problems with data organization for increasingly complex resource utilization and regional programmes have encouraged Botswana to turn to a geographical information systems approach. A major project to carry this out, based in the Department of Environmental Science, University of Botswana, is outlined in this paper. The paper documents the design of the programme and lists its modules and variables. It also reports on important considerations that have been taken into account in evaluating the programme's data sets and gives results from an illustrative pilot project that has been undertaken.     

SPATIO-TEMPORAL ASPECTS OF LAND USE AND LAND COVER CHANGES IN THE NIAH CATCHMENT, SARAWAK, MALAYSIA

This paper focuses on the large‐scale land use and land cover changes that have taken place in Sarawak state, East Malaysia over the three decades of 1972‐2002. Results are presented from a detailed land use and cover change (LUCC) study in the Niah River catchment using satellite imagery, questionnaire surveys and interviews. Successive waves of land cover changes have taken place. Large forest areas have been logged and gradually replaced by oil palm plantations, which now occupy more than 40 per cent of the total land area in the catchment. Concurrently, small‐scale farming systems have also changed. Formerly dominant Iban shifting cultivation practices are increasingly being replaced by cash crop production on permanent fields and impacted by off‐farm activities involving many ethnic groups. It is argued that land cover changes are continuous and complex processes involving a large number of variables which can be analysed for different time periods at various scales.     

(In)Formal memoryscapes and the unma(s)king of a Malaysian war heroine

The geographical literature on the politics tied to formal commemorations of the past is a burgeoning one. Yet, there has been less attention paid to similar practices undertaken by nonstate agents seeking to ensure that what is written out of official history is not forgotten. This paper explores how and why the story of Sybil Kathigasu, a woman who played a salient role in the resistance movement against the Japanese during the Second World War in Perak, Malaysia, has been peripheralized within formal memory making even as it has been informally revived elsewhere. It specifically suggests that, while the sidelining of her story may be the product of the tendency of the state of Perak to downplay its war past, Sybil's gender, race and political ideologies have also made it more difficult for her to be embraced as a ‘national’ heroine. Drawing on a private museum that was set up in her honor in Papan, the paper also reveals how factors impeding her formal remembrance also have implications for alternative efforts to recover her story. More broadly, the paper offers insights into women's absences in Malaysian public memory, and argues the need for more emphasis on memoryscapes ‘from below’ as a means of nuancing local remembrance politics.     

Malaysia's Three Major Ethnic Group Preferences in Creating a Malaysian Garden Identity

Malaysia has a complex multiracial population, predominantly defined by three major ethnic groups: Malay, Chinese and Indian races, with diverse cultural backgrounds. Despite this, the country has a vision to be the most beautiful garden nation, and its National Landscape Policy (NLP) puts emphasis on creating a unique landscape and garden identity. Because of ethnic and cultural differences, there are differences between preferences for developing a garden identity for Malaysia. Hence, this study focused on the visual quality of gardens. Representative images of four well-established gardens of the world including Persian-Islamic, English, Japanese and Chinese gardens were presented to the study's respondents through preference photo surveys. Respondents from the three major ethnic groups in Malaysia were asked to rate their preferred garden types, elements and scenes that they would like to see in Malaysian gardens. The results pinpointed expectations of the visual quality of gardens. These highlighted some similarities and differences between the three major ethnic groups in their preferences for the scenes and elements that they sought in gardens. Diverse factors must be considered when creating Malaysian gardens that will be accepted by Malaysians of different ethnic groups. Garden development reveals preferences attached to visual qualities and emphasises cultural differences between garden users.     

Places of Agribusiness: Displacement,Replacement, and Misplacement in Mato Grosso,Brazil

This article investigates the spatial logic and different moments of place‐making during the expansion of Mato Grosso's agribusiness frontier, in the southern section of the Brazilian Amazon. The analysis is informed by three conceptual concerns: the tensions between representation and experience, between humanist and class‐based explanations, and between the intensity of place‐making and place‐framing. Empirical results from a qualitative case study (carried out between 2013–2015, when agribusiness was the undisputed locomotive of the Brazilian economy) demonstrate that socio‐spatial changes in the last four decades evolved due to the complementary pressures and controversies of displacement (particularly in the 1970s–1980s) and replacement (in the 1990s–2000s), which eventually resulted in the widespread sense of misplacement due to accumulated inequalities and entrenched forms of socioeconomic exclusion. The principal conclusion found that the places dominated by agribusiness in Mato Grosso evolved around a totalizing spatial strategy that undermined alternative forms of production and livelihoods that do not fit in the export‐oriented agricultural model.     

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.     

Immigrants,Germans and national identity in the new Germany: some policy issues

"This paper considers how the role and status of Germany's diverse immigrant population has been affected by its new geopolitical situation, in particular unification, since 1989.... The paper shows how the integration prospects for Germany's older immigrant populations have been dented by the combination of economic restructuring and a huge upsurge in new types of immigration. Prominent among the latter are ethnic German resettlers (or Aussiedler), and the paper examines how these immigrants find themselves in a weak position.... The paper concludes that, although there would appear to be no major labour shortages within the economy, Germany has to develop a more extensive range of migration policies to cater for the huge demand for economically motivated migration. The alternative will inevitably be a further growth in illegal migration, which would not be helpful to the position of established immigrant populations."     

Capitalising the farm family entrepreneur: negotiating private equity partnerships in Australia

ABSTRACT

Research on the financialisation of land and agribusiness has highlighted major shifts in agri-food systems globally. Yet these accounts tend to focus on the activities of financial actors, and few take seriously the role of farmers in negotiating investments in land and agribusiness. Farmers in the global North may be well placed to benefit from partnerships with financial investors, although little is known about the way that such partnerships are formed. Australian studies of farmer agency have been productive in examining farm family entrepreneurs and globally engaged farmers who work beyond the farm gate to organise supply chains. This paper adds to these studies by providing insights about a capitalising farm family entrepreneur, who successfully negotiated and entered into a direct equity partnership with a large foreign pension fund. Several observations are significant: the exceptional skill, time and expense required to negotiate these partnerships; the role of consultants and non-human actors in structuring them; and the spatially- and temporally divergent farm development practices that are enabled by a shift from debt to equity financing. These observations are indicative of a new adaptive strategy of family farmers to shifting financial landscapes and of emergent family, corporate, and financial farm hybridity.     

Prosperity along Australia's Eastern Seaboard: Sydney and the geopolitics of urban and economic change

Throughout the last decade, the Australian economy has experienced its second longest period of uninterrupted prosperity in recorded history. The paper argues that this prosperity is sourced from an extraordinary surge in finance-based economic activity along Australia's eastern seaboard, especially in the Sydney region. Population growth in the Sydney basin has further fuelled the region's economic growth. The spatialised nature of this prosperity has produced a major shift in distributional outcomes across Australian regions and among households. Sydney-based households, especially those in inner 'global Sydney' neighbourhoods, have had access to high rates of job creation and sustained increases in income and house values. On the other hand, non-metropolitan households away from Sydney--those in regional and rural Australia--have experienced largely negative consequences as historical inter-sectoral and spatial redistribution mechanisms have been dismantled. The paper shows how divergent experiences of the new prosperity have produced an unstable political landscape in regional and rural Australia. It concludes by urging further research into the spatialised nature of economic changes in Australia, especially research that is conscious of distributional flows and outcomes.     

INTRAMETROPOLITAN LOCATIONS OF KOREAN BUSINESSES: THE CASE OF CHICAGO

Intrametropolitan locations of Korean businesses in the Chicago area are examined in terms of the ethnicity of their major customers: ethnic customers, inner-city minority customers, and White middle-class customers. The study reveals that Korean-owned stores providing important ethnic goods or services are spatially concentrated in Koreatown along Lawrence and Lincoln Avenues and in the northwestern suburbs. Korean businesses that serve inner-city minority customers are located mainly in southside Chicago, providing important necessities such as clothing, shoes, beauty supplies, and general merchandise. Uniquely, Korean entrepreneurs overwhelmingly dominate the dry cleaning business, which serves the White middle-class population and is thus scattered around the entire metropolitan area. Korean entrepreneurs' unusual market diversity comes from their effective utilization of ethnic resources and their unique linkage with the export-oriented home-country economy in the 1970s and 1980s. As a whole, their entrepreneurship has demonstrated the dynamic and complex nature of immigrant businesses in major American cities.