The spatial patterns of mass strikes: A labour geography approach

Labour geography aims to explore aspects of workers’ agency that have not yet been at the centre of research, this includes: the links between working-class politics and local communities, the interdependence of global economic networks and working-class activities, and the spatial dimension of workers’ organisations. Although these aspects are relevant for the dynamics of mass strikes, an analysis of mass strikes has been largely absent from debates in labour geography. Rosa Luxemburg’s seminal analysis of strikes in Russia demonstrated the rapid spatial expansion of these movements without any central organisation. Similar phenomena have occurred in recent mass strikes in the emerging economies. This text shows how mass strikes in Brazil, India and South Africa can be investigated through a labour geography lens and calls for a renewed debate on how a ‘strike wave’ is defined or understood.     

Mapping a path towards equity: reflections on a co-creative community praxis

‘Community geography’ is a growing sub-field that leverages academic resources to facilitate spatial research in partnership with local communities. The Mapping Prejudice Project and the CREATE Initiative, two interdisciplinary projects at the University of Minnesota, demonstrate some of the opportunities and challenges associated with practicing community geography. Mapping Prejudice is leveraging community crowdsourcing to build the first comprehensive spatial database of racially restrictive housing covenants in the United States. CREATE is co-developing research on critical problems at the intersection of environment and equity through collaboration with community partners. These two projects incorporate a methodological commitment to place-based and historically grounded research that seeks to make knowledge in—and in relation to—a specific place. Incorporating earlier feminist and critical GIS theory, these projects have adopted an iterative research model that places under-resourced communities at the forefront of the research process. Their work produces a fluid, responsive, and co-creative approach that has the capacity to legitimate its knowledge claims through responsiveness to community needs and collective experience.

     

Zoning in: The contributions of buyam–sellams to constructing Cameroon’s wild food zone

Studies of forests in Africa employ the term zone to denote a particular type of forested area. This limited usage speaks to a need for human geographers to pay more attention to elaborating and engaging with the concept of the zone. This article shows why human geography should pay the ‘zone’ more attention. Using Cameroon’s humid forest zone (HFZ) as a case study, the article focuses on how conceptual elaboration of the ‘zone’ can inform analyses of the food product trade in Cameroon. This trade is organized around various types of buyers and sellers (or buyam–sellam in pidgin), and offers a wide variety of wild products to Cameroon’s urban food consumers, including fruits and vegetables, game meat, condiments, medicinal plants, and fibers. Drawing on fieldwork surveys, interviews and focus groups in twenty-four markets of 203 buyam–sellams and 197 of their customers during the wet and dry seasons, this article analyzes narratives about Cameroon’s wild food zone. It ultimately shows what scholarly attention to the ‘zone’ offers in this case that other spatial concepts do not.     

Spatial plans and urban development trajectory in Kumasi,Ghana

This research uses empirical data to explore the link between spatial plans and ‘actual development’ occurring in Kumasi, Ghana. The research found that urban development is determined by both spatial plans and spontaneous informal development patterns (i.e. self-organisation). However, self-organisation is more widespread compared to spatially planned neighbourhoods. This phenomenon was expressed in a context of uncertainty created by weak institutional planning system which promote and reinforce haphazard development disregarding urban planning requirements. These findings provide a perspective on urban development that differs from that occurring in cities of developed countries, where planning institutions in consultation with urban residents determine the patterns of urban development. Unfortunately in Kumasi, self-organisation is not viewed as important in mainstream planning system. The paper concludes that more needs to be done in terms of understanding self-organisation processes, and the way they could be integrated into mainstream planning process to respond more fully to the urban development challenges in Kumasi.     

Systems of provision: Fast fashion and jeans

Using the example of jeans and the fast fashion sector, this critical review explores how systems of provision analysis can be used to understand geographical connections between spaces of production and places of consumption. The study of global commodity chains and production networks has proliferated in economic geography, yet the focus on transactions between places frequently omits to consider the material culture that surrounds processes of making and buying. In contrast, in cultural geography the meanings and transformations associated with ‘following things’ has explored the shifting meanings of commodities as well as personal experiences of shopping with a focus on signifying culture. Ben Fine’s systems of provision approach can offer a more comprehensive analysis. Fine considers how the role of the consumer has emerged as well as the economic processes through which value is established in goods and is an inclusive way of examining the activities that connect consumption and production. Through discussing some of the recent and emerging work on denim jeans this review shows how a systems of provision approach can effectively map a ‘fast fashion’ system and provides a framework that can be applied to other economic geographies.     

Geography of American rap: rap diffusion and rap centers

The goal of this paper was to contribute to the interdisciplinary research that linked place and music by conducting a brief geography of rap. Rap music grew from the isolated Bronx in the 1970s and became a mainstay in popular culture today. Hip hop music was noted for its strong sense of place, as rap credibility (what ‘hood do you represented), identities (e.g. Flo Rida), and local slang (e.g. sippin’ sizzurp in Houston) were often geographically-based. This research described the various spatial meanings of rap, mapped the diffusion of hip hop music, and identified rap centers. Cartographic analysis was based on the hometowns of 1124 rappers and the release dates of their debut albums from 1979 to 2015. The diffusion of rap followed the hierarchical diffusion pattern by leapfrogging from one major urban area to another.     

Change trends in urban freight delivery: A qualitative inquiry

In this paper we present the findings of a qualitative investigation of change trends in urban freight deliveries. The empirical material was gathered with urban freight (courier) company managers and drivers in Aotearoa New Zealand. It presents personal accounts of the everyday lived experiences of those intimately involved in the delivery of goods within the urban environment. Twenty-five interviews were conducted across four urban centres between June and September 2015. We use the four elements of the Energy Cultures Framework to explore what urban freight managers and drivers ‘have’, ‘do’ and ‘think’, and the pressures of an external context. Four interrelated themes are presented. 1. Online shopping and home deliveries, 2. Tracking and transparency, 3. New technologies, and 4. Meeting (changing) expectations, with evidence provided by way of verbatim quotations. The ‘mobility cultures’ concept is used to explore the relationships between the four themes, and to identify the key change trends that may affect the ability of the freight industry to contribute to a low-carbon transport transition. We conclude by signalling some policy implications and future research directions.     

Curbing the power of developers? Law and power in Chinese and English gated urban enclaves

This article contributes to the legal geography literature through exploration of the contested concepts of power and law and their interconnected processes. Research findings from studies of urban gated enclaves in China and in England are used as a starting point to analyse the spatialisation of power in the creation of gated urban enclaves, with a particular focus on the role of law. Four categories of law are identified. The article suggests an analytical framework for understanding how particular modalities of power intersect with these different types of law. This framework is then applied to temporal stages in the creation of gated enclaves, in the context of the different legal geographies of China and England. In the final analysis, the manipulative power of neoliberalism outweighs law’s authority, for example when developers form alliances with municipal government to circumvent ‘policy’ and ‘regulatory’ law. Property rights as conceptualised through ‘high’ law are shown to be ineffective in resolving problems experienced by residents of specific enclaves, particularly those relating to common property rights. Developers were found to use ‘facilitative’ law to gain control of the juridical field, materialised through property rights allocation and resolution of disputes within urban enclaves.     

Spatial modelling of commercial spaces in medium-sized cities

The pattern of commercial spaces in a city has never been the consequence of chance. Retailers have always searched for the ‘best location’, but the notion of what exactly constitutes the ‘best location’ has changed over the decades. It is no longer a question of being close-to-market. It depends on an amount of social, economic and even morphological aspects of urban life, not to mention intrinsic aspects of the retail sector itself, namely new types of stores, products and purchase and payment options. Consequently, the methods retailers have employed to determine ‘best location’ have also evolved, and today increasingly complex mathematical and geospatial models are in use. It should then be safe to assume that commercial geography has changed and therefore, commercial hierarchies need to be re-invented, or at least challenged. A current trend in the literature is revealing more than ever the influence of commerce in the spatial and morphological re-configuration of cities. Thus, the understanding of modern retail patterns may be a key issue in interpreting and regulating the processes of urban, social and economic development. Using as test-beds four Portuguese medium-sized cities, commercial and morphological data was collected, analysed and compared, applying spatial analysis techniques. Similar patterns were found between the four cities, which led to the proposal of two geospatial commercial distribution models, one for the city-centre and one for the suburbia. These models shed a new light on the structure of Portuguese medium-size cities, and may well be valid in other medium and small towns across Europe.     

There is no such thing as the ‘Ediacara Biota'

The term‘Ediacara Biota’(or many variants thereof)is commonly used to refer to certain megascopic fossils of Precambrian and early Palaeozoic age e but what does the term actually mean?What differentiates a non-Ediacaran‘Ediacaran’and an Ediacaran‘Ediacaran’from an Ediacaran non-‘Ediacaran’?Historically,the term has been used in either a geographic,stratigraphic,taphonomic,or biologic sense.More recent research and new discoveries,however,mean that the term cannot actually be defned on any of these bases,or any combination thereof.Indeed,the term is now used and understood in a manner which is internally inconsistent,and unintentionally implies that these fossils are somehow distinct from other fossil assemblages,which is simply not the case.Continued use of the term is a historical relic,which has led in part to incorrect assumptions that the‘Ediacara Biota’can be treated as a single coherent group,has obscured our understanding of the biological change over the PrecambrianeCambrian boundary,and has confused research on the early evolution of the Metazoa.In the future,the term‘Ediacaran’should be restricted to purely stratigraphic usage,regardless of affnity,geography,or taphonomy;suffcient terminology also exists where reference to specimens on a geographic,taphonomic,or biologic basis is required.It is therefore time to abandon the term‘Ediacara Biota’and to instead treat equally all of the fossils of the Ediacaran System.     

The urban land debate in the global South: New avenues for research

The global ‘land grab’ debate is going urban and needs a specific conceptual framework to analyze the diverse modalities through which land commodification and speculation are transforming cities across the globe. This article identifies new avenues for research on urban land issues by drawing on an extensive body of academic literature and concrete cases of urban land transformations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These transformations are analyzed by focusing on three types of urban investments – investments in property, investments in public space and public services, and investments in speculation, image building and ‘worlding’ – and the way these investments are intermingled with and enhanced by processes of gentrification and speculative urbanism. Addressing real estate and infrastructure investments, speculation and gentrification through a land-based lens allows us to deepen the discussion on urban land governance in the global South. We argue that urban land acquisition cannot be thoroughly understood in isolation from the workings of urban real estate markets, public policies, and displacement processes. The urban land grab debate needs to consider the dialectic interplay between land use change and general socio-spatial transformations both in central – or recentralized – and peripheral areas. This is why we plea for a kaleidoscopic perspective on urban land governance by uncovering the complex patchwork of urban land acquisitions and their diverse temporalities and spatialities, their hybrid character in terms of actors involved, and the multiple and often unpredicted ways in which urban dwellers try to gain control over and access to urban land.     

New local state power through administrative restructuring – A case study of post-Mao China county-level urban entrepreneurialism in Kunshan

By focusing on Kunshan, an economically advanced county-level city in the Yangtze River Delta, this paper aims to answer how, why, and under what circumstances the territorial power of Chinese urban entrepreneurial states is created in response to the dynamics of spatial economic development in the context of market transition and globalization. Although Kunshan is merely a county-level authority administratively, its economic performance in 2011 was better than that of several poor provinces, such as Hainan, Tibet, Qinghai, and Ningxia. Kunshan’s successful urban entrepreneurialism presents a unique ‘mismatch’ between ‘low’ administrative rank and ‘great’ economic performance (a big foot in a small shoe, dajiao chuan xiaoxie). I argue that Kunshan has developed several new local state powers through flexible administrative restructuring that explains the ‘mismatch’ puzzle and includes the following characteristics: (1) reclassification of Kunshan from county to county-level city, (2) relational adjustment by officially or informally raising Kunshan’s place rank and the cadre rank, and (3) boundary revision by virtual enclave enlargement. I conclude that the Chinese party-state system plays a role in Chinese county-level urban entrepreneurialism.     

Evolution,science and society: Historical reflections on the geographical experiment

Of the many diverse sources of naturalistic thinking in early modern geography, the penetration of Darwinian evolution is conventionally regarded as one of the most influential. In its application to social processes, the term ‘Social Darwinism’, as it is generally designated, has been used to describe almost any evolutionary perspective on human society. In its most common form, ‘Social Darwinism’ (or ‘Business Darwinism’, as some have designated it) has been portrayed as an attempt to provide ‘scientific’ justification for the cut-throat ethics of late nineteenth century capitalism. The main contention of this essay is that the widespread use of the term ‘Social Darwinism’, has obscured the variety of other ways in which biological analogies were applied to society, and that one of the most influential of these was the social model erected on the Lamarckian evolutionary alternative — a version of evolutionary biology widely espoused by geographers in Britain and America. Social Lamarckism, by emphasizing the cumulation of social improvements, repudiated the non-interventionism of ‘Social Darwinism’ and was used by many geographers to underpin their support for numerous educational, eugenic and environmental movements to improve the condition of humanity. And while biologically bankrupt, the Lamarckian social schema continues to be invoked as a viable model of society's evolution.     

The ebb and flow of power: British flood risk management and the politics of scale

This paper examines the rescaling of flood risk management (FRM) in Britain over the past 70+ years. Drawing on recent research in geography and elsewhere – which has engaged the politics of scale literature with the rescaling of water and environmental governance – we seek to illustrate the mis-match between the rescaling of the geographical unit of management and the nexus of power and control of those engaged in FRM. For those seeking positive examples of multi-level decentralised governance in water resource management, where power is shared across the spatial scales, our historical analysis struggles to find evidence. Rather, despite attempts to ‘hollow-out’ the state through the scaling ‘out’ and ‘down’ of FRM responsibilities, our evidence suggests that the control over key decision-making tools, resources and other modalities of power remains in the hands of a few key national-level decision-makers; it is the responsibility that has been decentralised, not least to those at risk of flooding. The application of the politics of scale theorising in a FRM context is innovative and, importantly, our case study demonstrates that such politics does not have to involve open conflict but is much more subtle in its deployment of power.     

网络信息空间的地理学研究回顾与展望

网络信息空间（以下简称网络空间）的地理学是当前地理学研究的重点方向之一。1991年万维网诞生并向大众普及后网络空间开始得到广泛认可,同时其作为一种新的空间与事物也吸引了地理学界的高度关注。以多种期刊数据库和搜索引擎为检索源,考察国内外网络空间的地理学研究成果。依据研究内容将国外研究归纳为网络空间地理内涵、虚拟社区、虚拟化身与认知、网络空间的经济地理学,网络空间制图和互联网6个重点研究领域,将国内研究归纳为互联网的区域作用、网站和虚拟地理环境3个热点领域,并分别进行了梳理回顾。最后对国内外研究进行了简要评述,从网络空间的外部层面、内部层面和作用层面提出了若干研究议题。     

Global production networks in the passenger aviation industry

Although the number of directions which geographical research on transport is taking has recently increased, the extent to which transport geography capitalises on theoretical advancements made in other sub-disciplines of human geography is still fairly limited. This especially pertains to economic geography which, in contrast to the predominantly positivist and quantitative transport geography, has developed over the last few decades a more post-positivist and qualitative profile. By means of focusing on passenger air transport – one of the most neglected industries in economic geography – this paper aims to help bridge this gap. Three under-researched aspects of air transport are identified and a combination of two economic-geographical approaches – global production networks (GPN) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) – is advocated as a useful conceptual basis for further, more qualitative and more critical research on this dynamic sector. The paper argues that GPN and EEG would help research on air transport to: (1) employ network thinking beyond the infrastructural understanding of networks of air connections and thus better explain the multi-actor nature of the aviation sector, (2) complement the research on supra-national and national regulatory frameworks with more attention to the array of sub-national environments that shape the aviation industry ‘from below’, and (3) explore how the relations between aviation and economic development are moulded by different place-specific institutional factors. To lay foundations under further research the paper conceptualises the aviation industry as a global production network and uses the example of Polish passenger air transport to highlight the paper’s key empirical implications.     

中国城市空间分布的双侧对称性

借助尺度归并和笛卡儿变换思想考察中国城市的宏观分布规律,发现中国城市在一定的空间和规模尺度上具有双重对称性：以秦岭—淮河为界,南方城市与北方城市呈现双侧对称特征;以呼和浩特—太原—郑州—武汉—广州沿线为轴,东部城市与西部城市形成双侧对称局势。中国城市的宏观对称性与地球公转和自转的方式有关,海陆差异、地表形态和水系构成是影响城市对称格局的重要因素。城市的对称分布属于广义的形态发育问题,对称形成的内在机制可能在于人类空间行为的自组织演化。     

宝鸡市城市空间形态演化研究

合理选择宝鸡城市空间拓展方向,推动城市空间集约化发展,达到城市与区域生态协调发展.在大量查阅相关资料的基础上,运用定性描述和带形城市空间扩展理论进行探讨.宝鸡城市空间扩展分四个阶段,自然地理环境、经济发展水平及交通条件是驱动城市空间扩展演化的主要动力.城市空间拓展必须合理选择发展方向,通过交通及生态建设,实现市域城镇间...     

More rhetoric or less action? Digging into urban health vulnerabilities: insights from urbanizing Accra

Urbanization is a product of development and in recent years, most cities have been experiencing unprecedented growth with improvements in their infrastructure. The obvious benefits of the process tend to paradoxically overshadow its insidious symptoms, as unregulated growth tend to create huge unmet needs such as lack of access to good-quality services, increasing poverty and deteriorating environment. The origin of this dichotomy is rooted in the governance practices where city authorities pay greater attention to issues of managing the ‘global commons’ than the critical ‘brown issues’, such as improving water supply and sanitation that affect the urban poor. Using multiple research techniques, this study highlights how such neglected necessities consign sections of the population to one of the deadly infectious diseases Ghana has ever known—cholera. The paper calls for an all-inclusive and explicitly pro-poor community-led orientation as one of the effective strategy for achieving equity in the urban settings and possibly, helps win the ‘war’ on poor sanitation.