Competing Perceptions of the Rural Idyll: responses to threats from coal seam gas development in Gloucester,NSW, Australia

Threats to rural livelihoods and rural landscapes have increased over time as developed nations in particular look for cheaper and more locally based alternatives to traditional energy sources to drive national economies. In New South Wales, through the expansion of coal mines and coal seam gas (CSG), small towns such as Gloucester on the edge of the Upper Hunter are faced with competing visions which seek to redefine their future. Powerful and competing discourses over land use threaten not only the sustainability of the region but the integrity of its sense of place, centred on community, rurality, agricultural production and confrontation of risk from mining. The different discourses of local groups such as ‘tree-changers’, established residents and farmers conflict with those of external organisations such as the State government and mining/CSG companies which envisage Gloucester as a ‘balanced’ space of co-existence and position it as a new node in the carbon supply chain.     

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.     

Sustainability,development and rural aboriginal communities

Aborigines, because of their population numbers and increasing control over land and resources, are crucial to the sustainable development of rural Australia. However, appropriate Aboriginal development requires the replacement of the ‘top‐down’ approaches generally adopted by government agencies by ‘bottom‐up’ approaches reflecting the needs and aspirations of rural Aboriginal people. Past experience demonstrates that Aborigines have faced many frustrations in reconciling these concepts. But some approaches now being adopted in the use and management of Australia's rangelands provide interesting alternatives which may be more generally applicable in enhancing rangeland sustainability. Examples include land‐use practices conducted by Aborigines living in remote homeland centres on their own freehold land, and the diversity of land uses introduced on pastoral stations now under Aboriginal ownership. Broader recognition of the value of these approaches will depend on widespread acknowledgment of the overall worth of Aboriginal land management knowledge in rural restructuring     

Water demand management in Yemen and Jordan: addressing power and interests

This paper investigates the extent to which entrenched interests of stakeholder groups both maintain water use practice, and may be confronted. The focus is on the agricultural sectors of Yemen and Jordan, where water resource policymakers face resistance in their attempts to reduce water use to environmentally sustainable levels through implementation of water demand management (WDM) activities. Some farmers in both countries that have invested in irrigated production of high-value crops (such as qat and bananas) benefit from a political economy that encourages increased rather than reduced water consumption. The resultant over-exploitation of water resources affects groups in unequal measures. Stakeholder analysis demonstrates that the more ‘powerful’ groups (chiefly the large landowners and the political elites, as well as the ministries of irrigation over which they exert influence) are generally opposed to reform in water use, while the proponents of WDM (e.g. water resource managers, environmental ministries and NGOs, and the international donor community) are found to have minimal influence over water use policy and decisionmaking. Efforts and ideas attempted by this latter group to challenge the status quo are classified here as either (a) influencing or (b) challenging the power asymmetry, and the merits and limits of both approaches are discussed. The interpretation of evidence suggests current practice is likely to endure, but may be more effectively challenged if a long-term approach is taken with an awareness of opportunities generated by windows of opportunity and the participation of ‘overlap groups’.     

‘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.     

Planning with complexity—how do we deal with stakeholder and spatial heterogeneity in land use planning?

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(2):23–37, 2005

As a reaction to the 'top-down 'approach to rural development during the 1970's and 1980's, and in line with the increased focus on ‘putting farmers first’ (bottom-up) through local participation, new and integrated approaches to natural resource management (NRM) have been launched to generate sustainable development. This paradigmatic change has greatly influenced land use planning. Some of the implications involved in this change are discussed in this paper and based on empirical data from Tanzania and Botswana. In this paper we will discuss three critical issues related to land use planning for sustainable NRM: the complexity of livelihood strategies at the local level, the role of different stakeholder interests and the importance of spatial scale considerations. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding that the different and often erratic resource endowment of the rural households influences the strategies these households follow in order to meet their overall needs, rather than ‘simply’ maximizing agricultural yields. Furthermore, the importance of spatial scale, in relation to both different stakeholder interests and their needs will be discussed. The paper highlights the need to take community heterogeneity into consideration in land use planning if sustainable NRM is to be achieved in the future.     

The meaning of place: Attachments to Femundsmarka National Park,Norway, among tourists and locals

In Norway, the management of natural and cultural resources is subject to increasing public scrutiny. Conflicts are escalating over many issues concerning the balance between preservation and utilisation. Traditionally conflicts over issues like growth in commercial nature tourism, predator control, forest policies, protected areas management, cultural heritage protection, and rights associated with common access, have been explained in terms of opposing values, attitudes, and goals between urban and rural interests. However, historical differences between the urban and rural in terms of social conditions, employment opportunities, services, cultural norms, and lifestyles are no longer clear-cut or predictable. Nor can differences between urban and rural communities easily explain attitudes or values held in relation to the environment. To examine how a local community and a population of tourists feel about an area we examine data from two separate surveys from the Femundsmarka-Røros region in Southern Norway. This region includes a wilderness-type national park and a historic mining town recognised as a World Heritage Site and including a diverse agricultural landscape. We compare the perspective of the community with that of tourists regarding the strength and nature of attachment to place, and reasons and priorities for resource protection. We also assess how residence and experience of using the area affect attachment to place and attitudes to management priorities. The results have implications both for the management of this particular area, and for how we approach attitude diversity in resource management.     

Cross‐border rubber cultivation between China and Laos: Regionalization by Akha and Tai rubber farmers

This paper is a multi‐sited ethnography of cross‐border rubber cultivation between China and Laos. Smallholder minority rubber farmers from Xishuangbanna (China) have forged successful informal share‐cropping arrangements to grow rubber trees on the land of relatives and friends in neighbouring Laos. By becoming rich and entrepreneurial rural citizens, Akha and Tai farmers have also, in their own eyes, raised their own ‘quality’ (suzhi) and see themselves as ‘modern’. By examining various meanings of ‘modern’ in China, and contrasting the rubber farmers' experience with Jacob Eyferth's notion of rural ‘deskilling’, this paper shows how through learning to plant, cultivate and tap rubber, these farmers have taken on the discipline and technical knowledge of ‘modern’ workers and become ‘skilled’. By rising in ‘quality’, minority farmers on China's periphery challenge the entrenched binaries of urban/rural, modern/backward, prosperous/poor and Han/minority nationality. Xishuangbanna minority farmers acknowledge that they are also ‘backward’ in the Chinese social hierarchy, but their extension of rubber cultivation to kin and others in Laos has confirmed their modernity as dispensers of development, technical know‐how and ‘superior’ Chinese culture to Lao farmers who are ‘backward and poor’. In contrast to large state rubber farms that have failed to establish rubber plantations in northern Laos, minority farmers have created regionalization.     

Trial by Fire: natural hazards,mixed-methods and cultural research

This paper considers the issues of research ‘relevance’ and ‘use’ to reflect upon a cultural geography research project on bushfire that did not begin with any specific aim of being useful to policy makers but which has garnered considerable and ongoing interest from a broad audience. It provides an example of how the integration of quantitative and qualitative research methods and data can enhance research into cultural aspects of natural hazards whilst simultaneously playing a key role in ensuring that the research results are of interest to a wide range of groups. Using a mixed-methods research approach was found to provide insight into complex factors that influence attitudes and actions towards bushfire amongst diverse landholders in rural–urban interface areas in south-east Australia. We argue that mixed-methods research is a powerful tool in building and enhancing a cultural geography that has policy relevance, retains analytical depth, and is acceptable to risk managers. The ability of cultural geography through mixed-methods research to illuminate how socio-cultural processes are central to environmental attitudes and preparedness behaviour has direct relevance to recent international discussions of how to manage the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in bushfire-prone rural–urban interface areas.     

城市化进程中的“去领域化”与“再领域化”:兼议城乡治理——对广州市江口村的分析

领域化是当前政治地理研究的核心概念和理论。城市化将农村区域划入“城市”之中,城市局限往往通过土地扩张来解决,地方和国家等不同行动者呈现出不同尺度的领域化和去领域化的策略。本文以广州一个正在城市化的村落为例展开历时态研究,并得出以下结论：首先,城市化中的“领域化”和“去领域化”第一层次为土地,国家根据法律以及城市依据自身发展需要将土地纳入城市范畴;其次,第二层次为围绕利益空间的“领域化”和“去领域化”,伴随着地方政府、企业、村集体、村民等的策略,不同主体和话语开始进入并协商博弈;第三层次为地方认同,竞争性的“再领域化”促成地方认同的产生和变化。这三个层次的不一致性导致了不同时期治理方式的差异和治理困境的产生。本文从领域化理论视角深入探究尺度政治如何在城市化过程中产生和得以体现,以及不同城市化发展时期和城市空间转变中的城乡边界动态变化、村落自我调整的复杂过程以及城乡融合过程中的治理挑战,最后给出政策思考和建议。     

西方乡村性研究进展

在梳理20世纪60年代以来乡村性研究的社会、学术背景的基础上,聚焦于乡村性的社会建构流派及其对中国乡村转型与乡村地理研究的启示。社会建构流派将乡村性看作是社会、文化建构的过程与产物而非先存的事实,重点关注乡村转型过程中的权力关系与差异性。由描述性流派、乡土流派向社会建构流派的过渡可以看作是从关注乡村性物质层面转向想象层面,由追求乡村性的本体、核心机制向探索乡村性的认识论问题,也就是从追求“乡村性是什么”到研究“不同社会群体如何认识乡村性”“不同社会群体多样化的乡村性话语和体验”。而目前的中国乡村性研究主要关注乡村性指标及其模型建构,相关研究对于各级政府全面地了解现存的乡村问题并合理地制定乡村发展、复兴政策规划具有重要的实践意义。在西方乡村研究中,乡村性指标由于暗含线性发展观、无法解读乡村变迁的机制和过程而饱受批判。在中国乡村急剧变迁的今天,现代化乡村发展话语占据着主导地位,而在这一过程中不公平的权力关系和霸权话语对部分农村、农民的边缘化基本没有提及。在这种社会与学术背景下,乡村性社会建构流派对于解构乡村性主导话语、揭示乡村变迁过程中的权力关系及不同社会群体间利益冲突与协商具有重要意义。     

Why did a vehicle stop? A methodology for detection and classification of stops in vehicle trajectories

ABSTRACT

Trajectory data mining is a lively research field in the domain of spatio-temporal data mining. Trajectory pattern mining comprises a set of specific pattern mining methods, which are applied as consecutive steps on a trajectory with the goal to extract and classify re-occurring spatio-temporal patterns. Despite the common nature and frequent usage of such methods by the GIScience community, a methodological approach is missing so far, especially when it comes to the use of machine learning-based classification methods. The current work closes this gap by proposing and evaluating a machine learning-based 3-steps trajectory data mining methodology using the detection and classification of stop points in vehicle trajectories as example. The work describes in detail the applied methodologies with respect to the three mining steps ‘stop detection’, ‘feature extraction’ and ‘classification in traffic-relevant and non-traffic-relevant stops’ and evaluates six machine learning-based classification algorithms using a real-world dataset of 15,498 vehicle trajectories with 5,899 detected stops (thereof 2,032 manually classified). Due to its exemplary nature, the presented methodology is suited to act as blueprint for similar trajectory data mining problems.     

“人口回流”视角下的中部地区乡村振兴——对湖北“毛嘴模式”的实证

采用质性研究方法,以中部地区湖北的“毛嘴模式”为例,围绕武汉汉正街与仙桃毛嘴镇的城乡联系问题,研究人口回流及返乡创业所带动的地方发展,解析其对乡村振兴的重要作用。研究发现：①劳动力回流受家庭需求、家乡发展环境等多重因素影响;资本回流的主要影响因素是雇佣“本地化”劳动力,也涉及城市更新及其“外部性”效应的间接影响;②技能型劳动力回流以及企业家在城-乡间的高频流动,有利于发挥流动人口的“桥梁”作用;③回流人口主要从事与之前就业相关的行业,倾向于在镇区或市区购买商品房,促进了乡村经济转型,同时利于社会资本的培育,重塑了乡村社会空间。     

Constructing the News: The Role of Local Newspapers in Environmental Risk Communication*

Effective risk communication is central to good environmental risk management. While studies have shown that newspapers are the primary source of information to the public regarding environmental issues, little is known about how environmental news is used as a risk‐communication tool. This article explores the role of local information systems in risk communication, using newspaper content analysis as well as in‐depth interviews with journalists and community residents to develop a case study of an environmental assessment process for a nonhazardous industrial‐waste landfill. Results indicate that risk messages were chosen and shaped by journalists on the basis of their own exigencies. In addition, while newspapers were a major source of risk information, their impact was mitigated by resident distrust and access to other information sources, most notably their own personal information networks. These results have implications for environmental policy, as decision makers often use—either passively or actively—print media as a risk‐communication tool.     

A crowd sensing system identifying geotopics and community interests from user-generated content

This paper presents a crowd sensing system (CSS) that captures geospatial social media topics and allows the review of results. Using Web-resources derived from social media platforms, the CSS uses a spatially-situated social network graph to harvest user-generated content from selected organizations and members of the public. This allows ‘passively’ contributed social media-based opinions, along with different variables, such as time, location, social interaction, service usage, and human activities to be examined and used to identify trending views and influential citizens. The data model and CSS are used for demonstration purposes to identify geotopics and community interests relevant to municipal affairs in the City of Toronto, Canada.     

Māori women: Bodies, spaces, sacredness and mana

Abstract: This article examines Māori women and the ways in which their bodies are constituted within particular cultural spaces, namely at urupā and sites where food is gathered. Māori bodily rituals, and the impacts of colonization on these bodily rituals, are explored to reveal a ‘nonwestern’ perspective on exclusion. Kaupapa Māori research and postcolonial theory have been combined to produce research that respects and nurtures Māori practices. Colonial notions of blood and menstruation, which inscribe women as ‘dirty’ and ‘unclean’, are critiqued. What is advocated is a Māori perspective that constructs Māori women as connected to Atua, and as powerful, sacred and life‐giving.     

Managing migration in the Greater Mekong Subregion: Regulation,extra‐legal relation and extortion

One major aim of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) integration programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), is to foster regional ‘community’ for sharing resources, people and financial flows. This ‘community’ is the target of both economic growth and poverty reduction. The emphasis on ‘community’ in the ADB's mushrooming quantity of documents raises important questions about what kinds of people are included, in what roles and with what kinds of support and protection. This paper explores these questions in relation to the political economy of regulating ethnic migrants from Myanmar working in Thailand. This paper argues that extra‐legal relations between migrants and state/para‐state agents constitute a crucial part of regulation. In transferring the regulation of migration to the national scale, the ADB inadvertently reinforces national differences between Thais and cross‐border people. Additionally, the complicated and fluctuating implementation of national regulations in both countries leaves migrants subject to violence and extortion from state and quasi‐state agents in Thailand. This paper shows that the dynamics of global capitalism require ‘deportable labour’ supplied by ethnic migrants who are included in the GMS community as the most invisible, vulnerable and exploited members.     

Racism and Intolerance in Eastern Australia: a geographic perspective

Racism has become a fact of life in Australia over the past decade or so, yet there are relatively few studies of its nature or extent, and still fewer on its geography. Using a social constructivist approach, this study draws on a survey of 5056 respondents to investigate attitudes to racism and cultural diversity in New South Wales and Queensland, and of perceptions of out-groups as instances of ‘strangers in our midst’. On racism, results show the presence of a continuum of attitudes ranging from generally tolerant to generally intolerant, a presence which cuts across compositional (social or aspatial) characteristics to emphasise the existence of a distinctive geography, an everywhere different nature to racist and non-racist attitudes which transcends urban–rural and traditional social layers. On the other hand, perceptions of out-groups are not uniformly correlated with presence or absence of cultural diversity. In many cases, the ability to make judgements about significant ‘others’ or out-groups has been shown to relate more to abstract notions of self and national identity, reproduced in public by mainstream news media and political leaders. In particular, it may reflect an Anglo (or Anglo-Celtic) view on nationalism, which is a hallmark of the ‘new racism’: an assimilationist or ethnocultural view of Australian society which is different from the ‘civic nation’ ideal envisaged by multiculturalism. That the geography of attitudes and perceptions people have towards and about different cultural groups is so ‘everywhere different’ has important implications for attempts to address and redress issues of intolerance in Australia.     

基于报业话语的广州非裔社区的空间想象分析

使用文本分析和访谈的方法,本文检视了2007-2017年广州报业对广州非裔群体及非裔社区的话语表征。研究发现,受媒体自身对新闻素材的要求以及地方政治实践对媒体的影响,早期的广州报纸构建了指向性明确、有符号意味且被污名化的非裔空间地图。早先的话语产生了消极的社会影响,且一定程度上激化了非裔群体和地方社会的矛盾。其后,随着宏观政治格局的变化,尤其是置于构建社会主义和谐社会与中非合作论坛等语境时,广州报业媒体对于非裔报道致力于塑造中非发展共同体的地理想象,构建积极的广州非裔和非裔社区的形象,以期重构非裔社区的意义。广州报业的非裔话语是族裔社区空间形象构建过程,进而成为地方政治、国家政治和国际政治持续投影、纠葛和变化的地理再现。研究从社会文化地理学和政治地理学的角度丰富了对族裔社区划界、空间生产和地理想象的理解,试图建立报业舆论与地缘政治的地理视角联结。从实践和应用的角度来讲,本文探讨了全球化背景下媒体话语对跨境文化交融带来的挑战和影响,对于实现全球化背景下的中外多元文化交融与协商、实现良性的国际关系互动具有一定的参考价值。     

江汉平原乡村聚落形态类型及空间体系特征

依据国土空间用地GIS数据及村镇统计数据,采用聚类分析及分形学方法,探索江汉平原乡村聚落空间形态类型及空间体系特征。研究表明,江汉平原因其内部自然环境基质的差异,形成了“二类四型”聚落空间形态:低丘岗地地域,主要是均衡镶嵌型聚落空间形态,可分为高密度（斑块）低丘点状形态及中密度（斑块）岗地团块形态2种亚型,此类聚落形态的村镇呈现出“星点”式空间结构;河渠水网地域,主要是轴带依附型聚落空间形态,可分为低密度（斑块）滨湖弧带形态和中低密度（斑块）河渠直线形态2种亚型,此类聚落形态的村镇呈现“点轴”式空间结构。江汉平原“二类四型”乡村聚落形态及空间体系结构在长江中游平原水网农区有一定的典型性,可以为此类乡村聚落空间重构、乡村居民点体系优化提供理论基础及实践指导。