Understanding older adults’ social capital in place: Obstacles to and opportunities for social contacts in the neighbourhood

Social capital has been a popular concept used in research and policy to stress the value of social contacts for the health and well-being of older adults. However, not much is known about the obstacles to and the opportunities for local social contacts in older adults’ everyday lives. In this paper we provide a geographical account of older adults’ social capital, by taking the main context of their daily life, the neighbourhood, into consideration. We draw on semi-structured and walking interviews with 17 older adults living in an urban neighbourhood in the Northern Netherlands in order to illustrate the meanings of, the obstacles to and the opportunities for local social contacts. Our findings show that the neighbourhood is not an isotropic surface where opportunities for developing social capital are evenly distributed. The potential benefits of older adults’ local social contacts differ depending on the place of social interaction within the neighbourhood and expectations associated with these interactions. Furthermore, different time geographies of older and younger residents as well as ageist stereotypes of older adults’ body capital influence the development of social capital in the neighbourhood.     

Identifying ‘place’ in place branding: core and periphery in Brisbane’s “New World City”

Brisbane is Australia’s third largest city, and capital of the state of Queensland. It has a sprawling urban footprint and impending connections to neighbouring metropolises, said to create a ‘200 km city’. The governing body of Brisbane controls the largest municipality in Australia, with unrivalled opportunity to influence both urban planning and marketing for the CBD and suburbs. Brisbane is home to over one million people, and its population has grown rapidly over the past decades, doubling in the past 40 years. Brisbane represents the quintessential city with an emerging quest for urbanity, both in brand and physical form. The relationships between the city’s urban planning and its branding is not well examined, despite clear entanglement between these two strategies. We use a case-study analysis of both Brisbane City (which is glossed as the Central Business District) and an outer-suburban area, Inala, to interrogate how urban identities and brand are being constructed in relation to their social settings and governance, with particular reference to the importance of city branding and its relationship to planning strategies. The manifestation of branding and relationship to place qualities at the core and on the periphery of Brisbane are examined, with relevance for other rapidly growing, ambitious cities. The focus of Brisbane’s push for urbanity is on the city centre, and is not representative of the typical suburban condition, nor of many cities dominated by suburban forms. An analysis of place brand, planning strategies and resident’s responses to place, from planning, architectural and anthropological perspectives are offered, as an alternative reading of place brand from the marketing dominated approach usually favoured in branding analysis. We make recommendations to incorporate a more complete version of place in the construction of a “genuine” urbanity. We argue that the recognition of resident-centred place identity in place branding will produce more socially sustainable places, as well as more authentic city brands.     

‘There’s no future here’: The time and place of children’s migration aspirations in Peru

This article examines young Peruvians’ aspirations and the role of migration in their imagined futures, from a generational perspective. The data come from Young Lives, a long-term study of childhood poverty combining survey and qualitative approaches with children and their parents. The paper uses a biographical approach that sees migration as part of individual biographies as well as social structures and life course processes. The aim is to deepen understanding of the social contexts in which aspirations for and by children are generated, paying close attention to family migration histories, dynamic household contexts, and children’s migration networks. The analysis focuses on the time-spaces of migration aspirations, showing the way past, present and future are interconnected. It also emplaces aspirations by focusing on the way aspirations by and for children are constituted in and through particular places. The conclusion reflects on the role of poverty and argues that ‘aspirations’ are about much more than abstract ‘futures’; they orient actions in the present and say a great deal about young people’s current realities and relationships.     

‘A place for everything’: Moral landscapes of ‘swiftlet farming’ in George Town,Malaysia

This paper is based on 6 months of ethnographic, multi-sited research in Malaysia, and investigates the relatively recent phenomenon of edible birds’ nest farming in urban areas (‘swiftlet farming’). Swiftlet farms are typically converted shophouses or other buildings which have been modified for the purpose of harvesting the nests of the Edible-nest Swiftlet (Aerodramus fuciphagus). I use the controversy over urban swiftlet farming in the Malaysian city of George Town, Penang, to examine discourses used by key stakeholders to shape debates over the place of non-human animals in cities. By considering everyday experiences of urban swiftlet farming, I explore how this burgeoning industry is perceived amongst residents, and how it is deemed to be (in)appropriate within the political, economic and cultural landscape of George Town. Yet, I also consider how farmers have sought to contest these discourses on ideological and normative grounds. In so doing, I place the cultural animal geographies literature in conversation with emergent literature on landscape and urban political ecology. Such a framing allows for a critical evaluation of the controversies surrounding this case, and their implications for human-animal cohabitation in cities. The paper reflects on the implications of this case for how we regulate human-animal relations and live in contemporary cities, and the crucial role of animals in altering urban form, aesthetics and everyday life, particularly in non-Western contexts.     

‘Seeing red’ in national parks: How visitors’ values affect perceptions and park experiences

People’s reasons for visiting national parks have been well researched. So too have their park activities and how diverse activities potentially affect visitors’ park experiences (e.g. perceptions of overcrowding). Far less research has examined how park users’ environmental values might affect their perceptions of other users and the appropriateness of different activities – a potential source of conflict. Relationships between personal environmental values and environmental and social perceptions are complex and interactive in the context of park visitation. Visitors’ encounters with other users can powerfully affect their experience and enjoyment of parks, in turn reflecting such factors as values-related expectations and judgments in the context of national parks. Personal and social values may also play an important role in influencing whether different activities are perceived as ‘out of place’ in the context of national park place meaning, yet the conceptualization of values within geographic literature on parks remains comparatively weak.This paper utilizes a definition of values, derived from a concise review of the geography and social psychology literatures, to explain the results of survey research we undertook within national parks in Queensland, Australia. We use a ‘values-behavior hierarchy’ conceptual framework to consider how the personal environmental values of a sample of park visitors (n = 404) potentially affected patterns of park visitation, user activities, and user conflicts. Findings suggest that visitors’ environmental values shaped how they perceived other park users and the appropriateness of their activities. This has international implications for geographic research and other disciplines and professions involved in national park visitation, park use, and human impacts, on and of these powerful places.     

Evacuees’ reentry concerns and experiences in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike

Managing evacuees’ reentry into their communities after an evacuation can be a major challenge for emergency managers, especially in instances when evacuees return before the official all-clear message. Despite the frequency of post-evacuation reentry into evacuated areas, there have been few studies of this process and the issues returnees expect and experience during the return phase. A survey of evacuees after Hurricane Ike indicates that household compliance with reentry plans was low, with only a minority of returnees (38 %) complying with official reentry plans. An examination of reentry concerns shows that minority ethnicity, lower education, and lower income were associated with higher levels of reentry concerns and, to a lesser extent, with problems experienced after returning. Results also indicate that none of the demographic variables correlated significantly with compliance with official reentry plans and only higher income predicted later entry. However, concerns about reentry traffic predicted earlier reentry and concern about physical risk was related to reentry plan compliance. This study provides insight into the concerns that motivate households’ reentry decisions and can inform the creation of return strategies that account for people’s concerns about their hurricane-impacted communities.     

‘Nation-states’, ‘quasi-states’, and ‘collapsed-states’ in contemporary Africa

The revival of ethnic identities and the search for historical roots have been significant factors in re-shaping the map of the world in the late twentieth century. Multi-ethnic states have come under increasing strain throughout the century and undermining the concept of the nation-state. However, the successor states to the colonial empires in Africa exhibit the same strains as the often highly fragile successors to the European continental empires earlier in the century. The survival of these quasi-states has been dependent upon the support of the international community for over thirty years as a reaction to the era of colonialism. Anti-colonialism offers little practical support for states in a post-colonial, post-Cold War era. In some cases the result has been disintegration and the emergence of the collapsed state. The revived political movements aimed at democratisation and self-determination have unleashed forces which may be incompatible with the survival of the current state system.     

Conservation and development 2.0: Intensifications and disjunctures in the politics of online ‘do-good’ platforms

An increasing amount of interactive ‘2.0’ crowdsourcing platforms raise awareness and funds for conservation and development projects worldwide. By enabling two-way online collaboration and communication, these ‘conservation and development 2.0’ platforms hoped to provide new impetus and popular legitimacy for conservation and development initiatives in the face of budget cuts and general criticism of the ‘formal’ aid sector after the financial crisis. This paper presents the case of the flagship ‘elephant corridor’ project on the Dutch pifworld.com platform to investigate whether and how the ‘2.0’ element has changed conservation and development in line with these expectations. The paper describes and analyses online and offline dynamics of the project and shows that while online excitement about the project remained high, the concomitant conservation and development promises and imaginations ill related to offline local realities. This rather ‘traditional’ conservation and development disjuncture, however, needs to be understood against the system peculiarities of the politics of online ‘do-good’ 2.0 platforms. The paper concludes that as these peculiarities are significantly intensifying and changing conservation and development dynamics, they do not elude familiar (1.0) disjunctures and might even obscure these further from sight.     

Thermodynamics of ice polymorphs and ‘ice-like’ water in hydrates and hydroxides

Thermodynamic properties of water, in various families of hydroxides, oxihydroxides and hydrates (chlorides, chlorates, sulfates and sulfites …), have been calculated by using a large number of data available in the literature. A phase diagram of water has been used to find the first complete set of thermodynamic properties at 298 K, 1 bar of 8 ice polymorphs, from Ih (hexagonal ice, the common polymorph) to IX (very low temperature and high pressure polymorph). These results are used to illustrate the concept of ‘ice-like water’ available for a very large number of hydrated phases (noted X.H₂O) in which water is attached to the corresponding anhydrous substrate (noted X) within a large spectrum of different enthalpies (Δ_fH°) or Gibbs free energies (Δ_fG°), but within a relatively small range of others properties. Heat capacity (Cp°), entropy (S°), and volume (V°) of hydration water (X.H₂O−X=H₂O) appeared to be very close to those characterizing ice polymorphs such as ice II or ice VIII. This concept allows the authors to propose a classification of minerals in terms of affinity for water and to predict the relative stability of hydrated and dehydrated phases under climatic variations.     

Becoming a young migrant or stayer seen through the lens of ‘householding’: Households ‘in flux’ and the intersection of relations of gender and seniority

This paper conceptualises migration and staying by young rural Lao in the empirical context of above replacement level fertility as manifestations of ‘householding’ that interacts with other dimensions of householding. Drawing on the framework of the inter-generational contract and by juxtaposing qualitative and quantitative data I show that becoming a young migrant and becoming or remaining a young stayer is shaped by young migrants’ situated agency.The second part of the paper departs from conventional household-based analyses and introduces the notion of ‘households in flux’. This highlights the dynamic interaction between changing external dynamics affecting rural households, and internal dynamics that constantly reconfigure the field of the household. These conceptual readjustments require going beyond inflexible notions of the household, the analytical disconnection between a focus on migrants and stayers in migration research, and static readings of relations of gender and generation. Furthermore, the paper argues that intra-household relations need to be appreciated as gendered relations of relative seniority which are in the process of householding constantly made and remade, among other things, by young dependents through ‘staying’ and ‘leaving’. These conceptual moves help explain the empirical puzzle of why in rural Lao households young women are both the ones most inclined to become a young migrant as well as most inclined to become or remain a young stayer.     

‘Any place could be home’: Embedding refugees’ voices into displacement resolution and state refugee policy

This article explores refugees’ views about the ‘durable solutions’ or three Rs – Voluntary Repatriation, Local or Re-Integration and Resettlement – underscoring the need for refugees’ voices to inform policy actions taken on their behalf. Central to discourses on the right to return and the policy practice of voluntary repatriation is the salience accorded the nation-state of which territorial boundaries are an important defining feature. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Liberian refugees in the Gomoa-Buduburam camp in Ghana, this article elucidates the effects of essentialist assumptions about territory, nation-state, home and enforced repatriation on the rights of refugees. By studying practices around and responses to the so-called solutions to displacement, especially VR, insights are gained into various ways in which space is reproduced and contested by international/local implementers and refugees, respectively, in the search for solutions. Importantly, the extent to which the views of displaced persons are allowed to shape such practices is highlighted. The article concludes by encouraging an embedding of refugees’ views about the three Rs into reformulating state policy expressions in displacement interventions. Including refugees as active participants in resolving their own problems, it is suggested, is one sustainable way to address the canker of protracted displacement in our times.     

A ‘cartography of concern’: Place-making practices and gender in the artisanal mining sector in Africa

Sites of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in sub-Saharan Africa are often places of contestation and dispossession, particularly because mining laws and policies have generally been crafted to foster large-scale mining. This paper builds on research mapping the multiple ways in which ASM is associated with various wrongs – criminality, illegality, immorality, destructiveness - to consider how various, complex gendered relations and place-making practices within mine sites are occluded as a result. We consider these erasures in the context of ASM formalization efforts linked to particular state visions. We note that while negative perceptions of ASM persist, governments, donors and mining companies are increasingly engaging in different forms of negotiation with ASM representatives, particularly through establishing legal ‘ASM zones’ and encouraging or mandating artisanal miners to form associations or cooperatives: processes of formalization. With reference to African case studies, we outline potential issues and challenges in efforts to formalize ASM, while offering insights into how the politics of place-making inform these initiatives. Focusing in particular on the gendering of both the dominant place-making of ASM by policy-makers and regulators and the actual emplaced practices of ASM activities in specific mining sites we highlight the multiple, at times competing and other times overlapping, visions of space at work in this widespread economic activity.     

‘European Generation of Migration’: Change and agency in the post-2004 Polish graduates’ migratory experience

This paper suggests that a constant exposure to and experience of socio-historical and economic changes throughout young people’s formative years assist in development of individualisation and human agency capabilities, which impact on motivations for migration.Focusing on the cohort of Polish graduates, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who migrated to England post-2004, the paper highlights a relationship of individuals with change. It argues that frequent and major changes shaped such generational units into highly responsive, easily adjustable and focused on capitalising upon further relationship with change, e.g. through migration.The paper distinguishes two generational units within the researched cohort: ‘Generation of Change’ and ‘European Generation of Opportunities and Migration’. It also highlights that one of the motivations for migration of both groups is practical consciousness (Giddens, 1984) inaccessible to mindful reflection in migration motivations to England.Correspondingly, the paper contends that a generational belonging encompasses both the intentional and non-discursive agency in migratory contexts. Therefore, it is significant to explore and understand individuals’ generational vantage view of the world.     

Splendid isolation: ‘Philosopher’s islands’ and the reimagination of space

This paper argues that the metaphorical figure of the island plays an important but profoundly ambiguous role in the imagination of social space. The paper argues that ‘utopic’ islands have historically provided a fictional domain of experimentation that has informed the constitution of ‘real’ state spaces. From the 16th to 20th centuries this took the form of an increasingly consolidated and ‘global’ endotopia: a world, exemplified by the ‘political’ map, full of state spaces constituted as interiors. More recently, islands have served a very different metaphoric function, being used to create and legitimise spaces of exteriority – ‘xenospaces’ such as the online worlds of the ‘metaverse’ and the arcane legal/financial spaces of offshore – which in combination constitute an emergent xenotopia. The ‘philosopher’s island’ (Mackay, 2010), therefore, represents a complex and polyvalent spatial form that serves to continuously and expediently redefine the nature of social space.     

Making the landscape “home”: Narratives of bushfire and place in Australia

This study investigated how the meaning of ‘home’ influences the social construction of bushfire in two Australian communities at high risk. An increasing number of Australians are living in proximity to areas of high bushfire risk due to climate, vegetation and demographic changes. Land and Fire Management Agencies recognise an urgent need to understand what motivates residents to take action to mitigate bushfire risk, and individual decisions whether or not to evacuate when bushfire is imminent. In bushfire policy and management, the home is considered to be synonymous with the house and associated built structures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic research methods, we ‘mapped’ residents’ understanding of ‘home’. The findings suggest that the concept of ‘home’ embraces more than the private spaces of house and garden. Landscape practices such as gardening with indigenous plant species, ecological restoration, and habitual walking extend the home territory beyond the house and garden and into public landscapes. Physical elements of the landscape such as mountains and locally significant species of trees form part of the ‘imaginary’ of home. These findings are important to the on-going study of the meaning of home. The implications are also significant for land and bushfire managers as they suggest that community education programs that focus solely on the house may fail to connect with people’s wider sense of home in the landscape.     

‘Making space’ in Cairo: Expatriate movements and spatial practices

This paper examines what it means to be an ‘expatriate’ in Cairo through the lens of movement and space-making. Inquiring into a set of migrant (im)mobilities, spatial practices, relations, and imaginations, it argues that as a ‘spatialised’ identity category ‘expatriate’ narrates and enacts migratory privileges linked to wider hierarchies of social difference. It contributes to a growing literature examining the social and political dimensions of ‘expatriate’ migration and further engages scholarship thinking space and movement in relational and socio-historical terms. Rather than denoting an easily distinguishable group of migrants, ‘expatriate’ emerged as a contingent and ambiguous category of practice. As such, ‘expatriate’ stands in a productive relationship with privileged movement and socio-spatial processes. Like other migrants, respondents skillfully navigated the global differences in wealth, power and status they were presented with. Yet, unlike many other migrants, they did so from a privileged position within the global power-geometries of international migration. Migrants’ personal geographies were further shaped by how bodies were racialised and gendered in entangled, intersecting and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. This diversity and complexity of ‘expatriate’ geographies highlights the necessity of intersectional and situated analyses of privilege.     

Constructing legitimacy in post-war transition: The return of ‘normal’ politics in Nepal and Sri Lanka?

Bringing together ethnographic evidence from mid-Western Nepal and eastern Sri Lanka, this article explores how political legitimacy is constructed and contested in post-war environments. We posit that in the post-war context there are important changes in the kinds of politics, agenda-setting, players and tactics that are considered acceptable and those that are rendered transgressive, threats to order and stability, or otherwise placed ‘out of bounds’. The art of crafting political legitimacy is defined in sharp contrast to the immediate history of armed conflict. The end of the war and the resumption of supposedly democratic politics thus mark a shift in what is seen as legitimate or normal politics. This shift constrains certain kinds of actors, tactics, and registers and it amplifies others, while being itself a result of political work. We argue that a reduction of the space for dissent, and an increase of the space for politicking are complementary aspects of the redefinition of what constitutes legitimate politics in the post-war context. These adverse political effects are not simply problems of context – post-war environments being non-conducive to democracy – but rather expose the more fundamental fallibilities and contradictions of demarcating a legitimate sphere of democratic politics in particularly visible and precarious ways.     

Measuring negative sense of place: Israeli settlers’ forced migration

This research focused on negative sense of place, a subject that has not adequately considered in the literature. The main purpose of the study was to examine whether it possible to classify the different feelings of negative sense of place, arrange them in hierarchal order, and test them empirically. The aim of the research is to contribute to better understanding of negative sense and methods for examining it. Interviews were held with Israeli settlers who had been evacuated from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (in 2005) against their will; the research was conducted 3 years after their resettlement. The findings indicate that their perceptions of their places of relocation were negative, but at a relatively low level of (negative) intensity.