RESIDENTIAL LOCATION AND THE PROVISION OF HUMAN SERVICES: SOME DIRECTIONS FOR GEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH*

The concentration of poor, service-dependent groups in aging central cities results both from suburbanization of the affluent and from the reliance of the service-dependent population upon place-specific human services provided by the public sector. Such concentration of services and their users in deteriorating inner-city sites may be functional for the larger society, but it has adverse impacts upon those who are service dependent. This paper argues that the implications of locational interdependence between such groups and their support services demand a paradigm for urban geography that centers upon the fundamental structure and impacts of population/service-provision linkages.     

The Spatial Isolation of Elderly Single-Room-Occupancy Hotel Tenants*

This paper documents the spatial activity of elderly SRO hotel tenants in the service-dependent ghetto. Exploratory fieldwork was conducted in a neighborhood of Chicago during 1985 and 1986. At four of the identified hotels, 53 activity spaces were recorded by first-hand involvement in the geographical activity of the participants. The fear of both street crime and social-service agencies imposes isolation upon this population.     

Great Powers and Geopolitical Change

Abstract

Most traditional segregation measures, such as the index of dissimilarity D, fail to distinguish spatial patterns effectively. Previously proposed spatial measures modifying D suffer from several shortcomings. This article describes a general spatial segregation index based upon the concept of composite population counts, which are derived from grouping people in neighboring areas together to account implicitly for spatial interaction of groups across unit boundaries. The suggested spatial index can overcome the disadvantages of previous indices and can assess the spatial extent of the segregated clusters. The results offer a more comprehensive depiction of spatial segregation of a region.

     

The geographic distribution of small dams in Oregon using ecoregion and landform classification

Abstract

Small dams fragment river landscapes, disrupting channel connectivity and impacting water quality and quantity. Although they impound volumetrically less total water than large dams, the ubiquity of small dams suggests their cumulative impacts could be significant. Documenting the distribution and characteristics of small dams is necessary to understanding and mitigating their impacts. In this study, we compare datasets of small dams in Oregon, compile a new comprehensive dataset, and document geographic variations in small dam distributions between different ecoregions. We used Oregon Water Resources Department dam and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife fish passage barrier datasets to compare dam heights and contributing drainage areas between different ecoregions. Over 61% of Oregon’s land area is above one or more small dam. We highlight the location of Oregon’s small dams at valley margins, transition zones between flat plains and mountains, and areas of high population density. Given the hidden nature of small dams, evaluation of small dam impacts using public imagery is not effective. However, knowledge of small dam distributions given their association with landforms can aid in finding unrecorded dams, assessing approaches for evaluating their geomorphic impacts, and informing their management.     

Intraurban Residential Location Of The Elderly

Abstract

Many socio-economic analyses of senior citizens presume the aged to be concentrated in the central cities of American metropolitan centers. This presumption was examined by studying the intraurban residential location patterns of the aged in Toledo, Ohio from 1940 to 1970. The residential location patterns of the elderly in each census period were mapped and discussed. Also, their residential location pattern was compared with the distributions of the non-elderly population and the black population. Although a slight concentration of aged in the central city was noted, their distribution was closely related to the distribution of the non-elderly population. Furthermore, they are much less segregated than the black population.     

Another Landscape of Despair? Charting the ‘Service-Dependent Ghetto’ in Dunedin

Deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric patients since the 1980s has introduced a new population and a new land use to New Zealand's urban areas. This paper reviews the geography of deinstitutionalisation, and investigates whether the North American phenomenon of a service-dependent ghetto can be identified in Dunedin.     

FACULTY FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM 1955–56

The Organization of industrial production is becoming increasingly internationalized, and this is having important effects upon the groewth and changing structure of international trade. Three broad group of forces can be identified, each with its own set of economic impacts upon trade linkages: innovations in transport, communication, and manufacturing technology; the growth of multinational organizations; and changes in the politico-economic structure of the world. The international automobile industry is used to illustrate these developments.     

A geostatistical model for estimating edge effects and cumulative human disturbance in wetlands and coastal waters

ABSTRACT

The modification of landscapes for agriculture, residential housing, and other human uses has the potential to alter ecosystem function, reduce native biodiversity, and to diminish the capacity of natural systems to provide essential goods and services. Resultantly, methods aimed at quantifying disturbance intensity at the intersection of anthropogenic and natural lands are important to applied aspects of landscape planning and natural resource management, as well as theoretical facets of spatial ecology. Tools to appraise human disturbance in wetlands and coastal waters are especially needed because the topographic settings of surface waters make them particularly susceptible to pollutant accumulation, hydrologic alteration, and other influences from the surrounding landscape. Assuming a water resources focus, we developed a novel geostatistical method to quantify and visualize edge effects and cumulative human disturbance for all wetlands and coastal waters in the State of Florida (USA). Model validation revealed that estimated disturbance intensity was strongly correlated to species richness, levels of heavy metal contamination, and persistent organic pollutant concentration. The presented modeling framework offers a flexible means to assess human disturbance across spatial scales and could be readily applied to prioritize conservation land acquisition and to anticipate future impacts from the proposed development.     

The Changing Geography of U.S. Hispanics from 1990–2006: A Shift to the South and Midwest

Abstract

Between 1990 and 2000 the U.S. Hispanic population increased by 14 million, which is the largest decadal population rise in United States history. This increase was not spread evenly throughout the United States, nor was it isolated to locations that already had large Hispanic populations. On the contrary, areas that previously had a relatively small Hispanic population experienced large percentage increases. In this article the regional variability in Hispanic population growth is explored, along with an emphasis on the economic pull factors driving those demographic changes. This analysis illustrates how restructuring in the meatpacking industry, and the associated economic impacts, have created a dependence on a low wage, illegal labor force that has shaped the recent demographic trend in the South and Midwest.     

THE IMPACT OF CHANGES IN PRICING POLICY UPON TRANSIT RIDERS OF VARYING AGES IN CHICAGO *

The elderly and young represent a significant segment of the transit-dependent ridership in metropolitan areas. The impacts of a change in pricing structure and transfer policy upon these groups are examined using survey data generated from riders of the Regional Transportation Authority in Chicago before and after a major restructing of fares and transfer policy. Results indicate that the elderly and young differ from the general population of respondents in their sensitivity to these changes. Moreover, it appears that the restructuring of fares did not adversely affect ridership patterns for these subgroups of transit users.     

The Comparative Approach to the Study of the Americas

Abstract

The study of community helpers in second grade can be enriched by a unit on the location of neighborhood services. The school itself is a community service. Within a short distance of the school are located such services as a post office, a police station, a fire station, and a library. In addition to these public services, there are many small business establishments. Second-grade teachers can take advantage of these enterprises to help pupils learn the reasons for their locations. Additional benefits can be derived from this study; for instance, young children will be able to gather information from primary sources and to extract relationships from the data.     

Spatial Concentration in Australian Regional Development,Exogenous Shocks and Regional Demographic Outcomes: a South Australian case study

ABSTRACT

As a tribute to the massive contribution of our friend and colleague Graeme Hugo to the population and settlement geography of Australian rural areas, this paper presents a longitudinal study from his home State. It forms part of a wider study of the long-term demographic relationships between Australia’s rapidly growing regional cities and their surrounding functional regions. Of particular interest is the question of what effect the accelerating concentration of population and economic activity into a given regional city will have for the longer term demographic sustainability of its functional region as a whole. Taking the case of Port Lincoln, regional capital of most of South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, it examines the nature of change in the functional region over the period 1947–2011, and investigates the forces feeding, and partly counteracting, the population concentration process, informed by concepts of evolutionary economic geography. In particular it traces the demographic impact (particularly differential migration and ageing trends) of exogenous shocks to the region’s essentially primary productive economic base during the period of major change from 1981 to 2011.     

Automated terrain feature identification from remote sensing imagery: a deep learning approach

ABSTRACT

Terrain feature detection is a fundamental task in terrain analysis and landscape scene interpretation. Discovering where a specific feature (i.e. sand dune, crater, etc.) is located and how it evolves over time is essential for understanding landform processes and their impacts on the environment, ecosystem, and human population. Traditional induction-based approaches are challenged by their inefficiency for generalizing diverse and complex terrain features as well as their performance for scalable processing of the massive geospatial data available. This paper presents a new deep learning (DL) approach to support automatic detection of terrain features from remotely sensed images. The novelty of this work lies in: (1) a terrain feature database containing 12,000 remotely sensed images (1,000 original images and 11,000 derived images from data augmentation) that supports data-driven model training and new discovery; (2) a DL-based object detection network empowered by ensemble learning and deep and deeper convolutional neural networks to achieve high-accuracy object detection; and (3) fine-tuning the model’s characteristics and behaviors to identify the best combination of hyperparameters and other network factors. The introduction of DL into geospatial applications is expected to contribute significantly to intelligent terrain analysis, landscape scene interpretation, and the maturation of spatial data science.     

Urbanisation and centralisation in Norway

The need for population data in regional analysis

Policies targeting regional areas have been a central part of the planning system in Norway, at least since the last war – as they have been in many countries and now even on the European level through the European Union (EU). These policies are dependent upon relevant data on different regional levels. Criteria reflecting population growth, distribution and structure, are often used in analyses, preceding concrete planning initiatives and economic redistribution measures.     

Comments

Abstract

Latin America is the world's fastest growing region in population, and the consequent problems confronting Latin America are already evident in other underdeveloped regions and will become even more aggravated as demographic growth rates rise. Mortality can decline still further in some countries of Latin America and those countries will be especially hard-pressed in the near future. Implementation of fertility control will apparently be a slow process, so that the prospects are for continued very rapid growth for at least one or two decades. Population pressure on food supplies, resources, employment opportunities, and social services will continue to be formidable and further aggravate the fragile socio-economic structure and promote additional political instability. Much greater attention to population policy and program implementation is necessary to cope with population growth and the attendant problems in order to promote stability and improve living conditions in the region.     

Diverging Narratives: Evaluating the Uses of the Ideal-Typical Sequence of Transport Network Development

Abstract

The development of new transport systems has been an important and highly visible component of economic development and spatial reorganization in the past two centuries. The Ideal-Typical Sequence of network development has been a widely used model of transport development. This paper shows that this model has been used in several different ways, with different notions regarding the appropriate use, interpretation, and limitations of the model over time. Students must therefore think critically about ongoing changes to transport and communications systems and their impacts on economic and social conditions, as well as how these impacts are represented in models.     

Variables Affecting a Geographic Concept-Learning Task for Pre-School Children

Abstract

This study analyzed the relative effects of two categories of variables upon the learning of a basic geographic concept by a pre-school population. Independent variables were variations of irrelevant data and of positive-negative exemplar ratios. S's were 225 kindergarteners randomly drawn from nine schools, that, in turn, were selected randomly from the, total pool of public schools within a metropolitan district, A 3 × 3 factorial design was used, with S's assigned to one of the nine treatment groups. The learning task was the conjunctive concept, “island,” with the rule, “water all around the land.” Slides, tapes, and pictures were used to administer and measure the effects of treatments. S's were tested immediately after the treatments on seven criteria measures, and then retested one week later. Analyses of results sustained the null hypotheses, indicating that irrelevant material and increased negative exemplars were not significant factors in the learning task. Possible significance of the results was discussed.     

Using Dummy Variables to Estimate Economic Base Multipliers

Economic base analysis is a cost-effective and accurate means of predicting employment impacts in relatively small and uncomplicated regional (community) economies. Extending previous research using the Arizona Community Data Set, this paper estimates economic base multipliers in different types of communities by introducing dummy variables into regression equations. Total employment, transfer payments, and population potential are used as explanatory variables. Manufacturing centers are shown to have larger multipliers than diversified places, mining settlements, service and trade communities, and utility towns.     

Is being in work good for wellbeing? Work Integration Social Enterprises in regional Australia

ABSTRACT

Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISE) offer supported work environments for people experiencing disadvantage, including people with disability. This paper reflects on a research project that is mapping the ways in which social enterprises in regional Australian cities produce wellbeing for their employees. Through supported employment programs, these organisations are transforming individual lives, helping to build a sense of self-worth and purpose, and increase individuals’ social skills and capacities. Many of the perceived benefits are associated with a belief in the innate good of paid work. Based upon interviews with employees in the social enterprises, it is apparent that the hopes attached to providing ‘meaningful work’ are considerable. At the same time social enterprises are taking on social responsibilities that were once provided by the state, while also selling their services as employers of disabled and disadvantaged members of society and maintaining commercial viability of the enterprise. Using feminist political economy alongside discussion of the distributive economy, this paper explores how contemporary policy conditions, productivist biases and normative discourses about the value of wage work inflect the forms of wellbeing that can be experienced by WISE workers.     

Local government perspectives on rural retirement migration and social sustainability

Within the policy and academic literature, the impact of rural retirement migration (RRM) on community sustainability has been questioned. This qualitative study investigated the perceived impact of retirement migration on rural social sustainability from a local government perspective. Focus groups were conducted with local government senior managers and community services staff (n = 39) across six rural local government areas in one Australian state. Data were analysed against the three components of rural social sustainability (equity, community and rurality) proposed by Jones and Tonts [1995. “Rural Restructuring and Social Sustainability: Some Reflections on the Western Australian Wheatbelt.” Australian Geographer 26: 133–140]. While RRM is perceived to benefit rural community capacity to facilitate or maintain equity, community and rurality, it also presents challenges for local government. Participants suggested that capacity to facilitate equity, community and rurality in contexts of RRM was impacted by uncertainty around future impacts of RRM on population ageing, increasing advocacy and expectations of older in-migrants, and the impact of RRM on rural heterogeneity. These issues required local governments to think critically about how to accommodate and manage the needs and expectations of older in-migrants, while mediating potential impacts associated with RRM.