THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIAL THEORY: TOWARDS AN ARCHITECTURAL GEOGRAPHY ∗

Strategic planning is a technique from the commercial world which could assist geography departments in adapting to today's more demanding administrative environments and thereby further the development of the discipline. This paper sets out the fundamentals of planning as a prelude to a generic departmental plan. Key inclusions are explained and certain problems of application are discussed, should departments adopt such an approach.     

IMMIGRATION, GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION AND SOCIAL ECONOMIC STATUS OF AMERICAN CHINESE

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SOME EMPIRICAL EXAMPLES OF CENTRAL PLACE MODEL IN CHINA''S RURAL AND URBAN STUDIES

Sincethe195Os,theCentralPlaceTheory(Cpp)hasbeenprevailingallovertheWest.Nevertheless,theaPplicationofthismodelinChinasplanningworkusedtobeanargUableproblem.Negativeviewswerefl.thehyPothesisabouttl1enatUralandhumanhomogeneityisdevoicedfromthereality;2.thetheorytvasge11eratedfrol11caPitalistsociety,wherethehistorical,socialandeconomicconditionsaredifferentfromChina's.Inrecentyears,theauthorshavetriedtoapplyCppmode1toChina'Surbanal1dregionalplanning,thesatisfactoryresu1tsprovedthegenera1ada…     

JUVENILE GUN CRIME AND SOCIAL STRESS: BALTIMORE, 1980–1990

Violence, particularly among minority youths, is a perennial social problem widely regarded as synonymous with the inner city. This analysis examines 2, 639 juvenile gun crimes reported to the police in an 11-year period, 1980-1990, in Baltimore, Maryland. Attention focuses on patterns of selected categories of gun crimes and their relationship to a generalized areal measure of social stress. Salient findings were temporal persistence of pattern; close spatial relationship between gun crimes and (predominantly African-American) census tracts at or above the 8th decile in terms of a social stress index; the territorial nature of gun crimes; and a “frontier” effect with respect to gun crimes with black offenders and white victims. Applications of this analysis to violence prevention are discussed.     

IS IT ROSLYN OR IS IT CICELY? REPRESENTATION AND THE AMBIGUITY OF PLACE

Representations or images of place are widely recognized as contributing to how people understand the places in which they live, work, and study. Increasingly they are being seen to contribute to the production of places as well. This paper addresses the relationships between representation and place as social processes by examining the blurring of Cicely, the Alaskan town in the television show Northern Exposure, and Roslyn, the town in Washington state where outdoor scenes of Northern Exposure are shot. Two main points are raised. First, the production of place-images by the entertainment industry has material repercussions for the residents of places. Second, the relationship between Roslyn and Cicely helps advance an epistemology of place that recognizes that the entire set of boundaries we use to define places limits our understanding of places as open, ambiguous, and, therefore, political social processes.     

COMPARING DISTORTION ON SKETCH MAPS AND MDS CONFIGURATIONS∗

The terms “pure'’and “applied'’were used in connection with mathematics and the sciences in the Nineteenth Century and were affixed to geography no later than 1890. This paper is a review of some early occurrences of the term “applied geography'’in the period 1890–1904.     

THE FARMLAND CONVERSION DEBATE: NALS AND BEYOND∗

The need to protect high quality agricultural land through public policies and programs at various levels of government has been debated in the U.S. for at least three decades. This article reviews the evolution of the debate before 1979, the ill-fated attempt of the National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS) (1979–1981) to resolve the debate, and the current status of the land conversion issue. Articulation of the issue has been impeded by confusion of objectives, semantic problems, unreliability of land conversion data, and excess capacity in the American farm economy. Land conversion estimates published in 1977 by the Soil Conservation Service and relied upon by NALS have proven to be misleading in light of the 1982 National Resources Inventory. State and local programs to discourage farmland conversion are justifiable in terms of land use planning objectives, maintenance of a viable local farm economy, and avoidance of undue reliance upon marginal lands requiring costly technical inputs.     

ENVIRONMENTAL DISRUPTION AND ITS MECHANISM IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE∗

The development and testing of a computerized technique for utilizing multitemporal Landsat multispectral scanner data to estimate spring small grains acreage are described. The Kauth-Thomas green number transformation is applied to the data prior to application of the pixel-level standardized logic. Four years of data from the U.S. and Canada are used in testing. A comparison of the test results to those of the analyst-intensive procedures indicates a potential for increase in near-harvest estimation efficiency with little sacrifice in accuracy.     

GEOGRAPHY AND THE LESSONS FROM EL NIÑO∗

Recognized for years as a major environmental disruption, El Niño generated intense public interest in 1982–1983. During its last occurrence, this phenomenon, which develops in the tropical Pacific and usually affects rimlands of the Pacific basin, exceeded its boundaries and its effects were transmitted to continental North America, Europe, Africa and East Asia. Notwithstanding its vast areal extent, the interest of geographers in El Niño events, past and recent, has been comparatively less than that demonstrated by natural scientists and ecologists: little has been accomplished to place these climatic-ecological crises within global perspective. Lessons from El Niño include the acknowledgement of new concepts of climatic transitivity, ocean dynamics and energy exchanges that must find a place within the conceptual wealth of geography if this science intends to keep up with the rapid progress of other geosciences.     

SELLERS AND NONSELLERS OF LAND FOR NEW RURAL HOUSING∗

Landowners can choose either to sell or to hold their land in areas with active rural land markets. Sellers and nonsellers are both important because their decisions shape patterns of land use. Analysis of mail survey data from 286 landowners in the Rochester, MN SMSA isolates four characteristics that distinguish sellers from nonsellers: occupation, size of landholding, recent acquisition of land, and interest in selling land. Nonsellers are often farmers with a large landholding and no interest in selling. More information is needed about their non-economic motives for holding land.     

A FURTHER INVESTIGATION OF URBANIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA∗

The effect of distance upon agricultural production should be as apparent among primitive subsistence agriculturalists as in market-oriented societies. This analysis of yield variations among the Basotho of southern Africa attempts to determine the frictional effect of distance. The results show that distance does not explain variations in yield even when other physical factors are held constant. Perhaps such variables as household characteristics, not included in the analysis, would provide a better explanation.