ENHANCING AND USING A SENSE OF PLACE WITHIN URBAN AREAS: A ROLE FOR APPLIED CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

Basic concepts of cultural historical geography have been applied to a variety of community issues in St. Paul, MN. Through the process a sense of place has been developed at several scales. This inclusive sense of place has provided a link among various factions and made possible several compromises in land use and economic development issues. Most of the work was done through undergraduate field seminars.     

THE ARCHIVES OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS

Although numerous courses in geographic information systems (GIS) have been introduced into the geography curriculum over the past few years, there has been remarkably little debate over the issues involved. This paper first discusses the arguments for geography as an appropriate disciplinary setting for GIS teaching at the undergraduate level. This is followed by a discussion of the nature of GIS courses and their appropriate place in the undergraduate geography curriculum. The final section of the paper describes the NCGIA Core Curriculum project and examines its significance in this broader context.     

BACKGROUND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GRADUATE STUDY IN GEOGRAPHY

Research on the diffusion of innovation has been dominated for many years by an approach to scientific reasoning developed most thoroughly and influentially by Hägerstrand. Recently there has been a shift away from this approach. However, this shift has not been previously noted in the literature. After presenting the characteristics of the two perspectives in terms of the instrumentalist and realist conceptions of science, this article provides some evidence for the shift and identifies several key issues for future research.     

Annihilation of both place and sense of place: the experience of the Cheslatta T'En Canadian First Nation within the context of large-scale environmental projects

The water resources of Canada are today, and have always been, of major importance to the welfare of Canadians. Throughout most of Canada's history, these resources have been viewed within a supply–management framework and, frequently, exploited through the construction of 'megaprojects', often with little or no concern for issues such as environmental harm and social and community disruption. As in many parts of the world, those most affected by such large-scale water resource developments have been aboriginals (in Canada, 'First Nations' peoples). Although the issues of environmental, social and economic damage to First Nations as a result of water megaprojects have been investigated, little has been written about the impact of such projects – especially dam construction – on the loss of sense of place of deracinated peoples. This paper investigates one example of such loss of sense of place, that of the Cheslatta T'En forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the 1950s so as to allow for the construction of a private hydroelectric dam by the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan).     

The Elementary Social Studies: Sense and Nonsense in Integration

Abstract

The ultimate goal of all geographic education is to have our students think geographically for life. To this end, the five geographic skills sets allow teachers to use the inquiry approach to more accurately observe whether or not geographic thinking is actually taking place. As essential components of these geographic skills, fieldwork, journaling, and stories based on the field experience have proven to be effective tools of inquiry. This article demonstrates how a journal, kept by the author while on an advanced alliance summer institute to Russia in 1996, was used to write an original short story based on the author's fieldwork there. The author's experiences model the five geographic skills sets in developing lesson plans for the original short story, The Dragon and the Anchor. These activities allow the students to sharpen their geographic skills and develop a sense of place by studying the changes that have occurred in Russia since the fall of communism in 1991.     

Using mnemonics to learn place geography

Abstract

Learning place geography, the location of cities, nations, regions, major physical features, etc., is an important part of school geography. This investigation builds on research findings from educational psychology to address questions about effective ways to teach place geography. The study assesses the pedagogical effectiveness of several instructional strategies featuring keyword mnemonics and the attention-enhancing devices of repeated test-like practice and cooperative learning. The results of the research show a significant difference in place geography learning between mnemonic and non-mnemonic treatment groups. Geographic educators should continue to research cognitive strategies to determine their effect in learning place geography, particularly in the long-term effects of using keyword mnemonics alone and keyword mnemonics in combination with repeated test-like practice.     

Twenty-Second European Congress of the Regional Science Association

Abstract

In his article, “Whither Geography?,” Jay R. Harman raised a number of important issues regarding the nature and direction of geographic scholarship. In this response I critically address some of those issues and offer an alternative perspective. In doing so, I support Harman's desire for the discipline to “help answer deep human questions” but argue that rather than reinforce the vitality and legitimacy of the discipline, a market-based approach of the sort he advocates could instead potentially undermine such objectives and compromise disciplinary integrity by discouraging critical inquiry. While acknowledging the influence of “the market,” I defend a place for critical inquiry within the discipline.     

Building a Global Sense of Place: The Community Networking Movement in the United States

Community networks help build place-based community by offering individual citizens and organizations access to the Internet, the ability to post information online, and opportunities to discuss community affairs. Community networks are inspired by a dynamic vision of community that incorporates a global sense of place. A global sense of place is valuable because it helps to illuminate a place's connections with the world and may therefore enable scale-jumping forms of activism. This article analyzes interviews with participants in four U.S. community networks to explore how networks combine a politics of mobility, a politics of access, and a politics of place to construct a global sense of place. The degree to which each network emphasizes mobility, access, and place varies. This variation has implications for both community activism and issues of diversity in community. Networks that fail to link mobility, access, and place may increase, rather than decrease, inequalities in access to electronic communications as well as to forms of political power.     

Media Institute on Geographic Concepts

Abstract

A new political geography has emerged that stresses the political conflict behind the production of space. This orientation in the subdiscipline constitutes a turn away from traditional political geography, where the emphasis had previously been on the spatial distribution of political phenomena. The “new” political geographic theory has been applied to the study of environmental issues, turning the attention of scholars to the political struggle behind the construction of nature as well as space. This article reviews how the new political geography of the environment (NPGE) perspective has impacted the study of such environmental phenomena as hazards, siting issues, human-land relationships, resources, development, and international environmental governance. It concludes by suggesting how the NPGE perspective can inform pedagogy in environmental education.     

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.     

An Approach to Field Experience in Eighth Grade Geography

Abstract

Man, the social animal, has organized his cities for particular social objectives. His urban social communications take place within a spatially and socially restrictive network of interpersonal information contact. Viewed in this sense, cities exist to facilitate the social communications or interactions of their population. At the same time, however, diverse social goals and group frictions create barriers to smooth flows of information among urban dwellers. This paper introduces the theme of urban social interaction, outlines the structure of social ties in cities, and surveys two major urban problems relating explicitly to social interaction in the city. The approach here is to bring geographical concepts and knowledge to bear on problems of social interaction in urban space. It is hoped that greater insight by teachers and students into the social problems of cities is achieved by an improved understanding of the geography of social communications.     

Childhood asthma: Regional and social inequalities in parents' perceptions of the diagnostic process in Norway

This paper focuses on the 'cultural turn' which has taken place in British and to a lesser extent North American and Australian human geography in the last decade. It begins by exploring what constitutes the cultural in what has been dubbed 'new cultural geography'. It then explores contemporary claims that cultural geography has eclipsed or marginalised social geography. The final section evaluates these claims about the demise of the social, arguing that the social has not been evacuated but rather has been redefined. While this paper tells a specific story about a particular tradition and geographical frame of reference, it nonetheless has wider relevance because it provides an example of the differential development of particular sub-disciplinary areas, of the way subdisciplinary knowledges shape each other, and of the way understandings of disciplinary trends are contested.     

The Swedish Land Data Bank

Abstract

The Swedish Land Data Bank System has been developed in order to rationalize handling of data on real properties and land. The system replaces earlier manual systems for property and land registration. It interacts regularly with other EDP-based information systems and serves as a land information system (LIS) in a broad sense. The system is being steadily extended to cover all parts of the country. The costs for design, implementation and maintenance of the system are covered by reductions of costs for property and land registration.     

Applied Geography and New Geographies

Scale and resolution have long been key issues in geography. The rapid development of analytical cartography, GIS, and remote sensing (the mapping sciences) in the last decade has forced the issues of scale and resolution to be treated formally and better defined. This paper addresses the problem of scale and resolution in geographical studies, with special reference to the mapping sciences. The fractal concept is introduced, and its use in identifying the scale and resolution problem is discussed. The implications of the scale and resolution problem on studies of global change and modeling are also explored.     

MAPS,METAPHORS AND MUDDLES

The idea of a cognitive or mental map has been a source of confusion in the geographical literature for some time. Downs suggests that the confusion can be removed if we give consideration to the role of maps in metaphors and analogies. This raises important questions, but treating the map as a double metaphor does nothing to clarify these issues. Cartographic skills are not the result of introspection and hypothesizing such maps-in-the-head can only impede our understanding of spatial behavior.     

Medical Mapping: The Revolution in Teaching—and Using—Maps for the Analysis of Medical Issues

Abstract

As a result of advances in GIS, students from a range of disciplines (epidemiology, public health, medical sociology, and anthropology) are seeking to learn how to apply a mapped, spatial perspective to issues of disease and health. This paper describes a pilot program whose intent has been to develop an interdisciplinary, skills-based course in medical mapping using a case-based approach. The focus of its first module is the famous nineteenth-century case of a cholera epidemic in Soho, London. Here, however, that case–critical to a range of disciplines—is an opportunity to introduce modern GIS tools and their applicability to the issues surrounding the mapping of diseases in general.     

Implementing the Slow Life in Southwest Ireland: A Case Study of Clonakilty and Local Food

Cittaslow is an Italian‐based global network of towns and cities that grew out of the Slow Food movement. Cittaslow and Slow Food reject the standardization of culture and taste that has accompanied globalization. Instead, they focus on strategies that foster a sense of place that is derived from a town's unique environmental and cultural setting: its terroir. Clonakilty, a small town located thirty miles southwest of Cork, is Ireland's first and only “slow city.” This paper examines how a sense of place is conveyed in the town's restaurants through the selection of menu items and locally produced food. The results indicate that independently owned restaurants are more likely to embrace Cittaslow's efforts at conveying a sense of place than restaurants in hotels and pubs. Nearly all of the town's restaurants serving Irish food use locally available food suppliers.     

Named entity recognition goes to old regime France: geographic text analysis for early modern French corpora

ABSTRACT

Geographic text analysis (GTA) research in the digital humanities has focused on projects analyzing modern English-language corpora. These projects depend on temporally specific lexicons and gazetteers that enable place name identification and georesolution. Scholars working on the early modern period (1400–1800) lack temporally appropriate geoparsers and gazetteers and have been reliant on general purpose linked open data services like Geonames. These anachronistic resources introduce significant information retrieval and ethical challenges for early modernists. Using the geography entries of the canonical eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, we evaluate rule-based named entity recognition (NER) systems to pinpoint areas where they would benefit from adjustments for processing historical corpora. As we demonstrate, annotating nested and extended place information is one way to improve early modern GTA. Working with Enlightenment sources also motivates a critique of the landscape of digital geospatial data.     

Everyday Ecologies: Cities,Nature, and leaching Urban Ecology

Abstract

Conventional geographical approaches to the city tend to place the study of urban form and urban space squarely within the political-economic and cultural branches of geography. Geographic pedagogy has tended to assume, therefore, that nature is absent from the city or exists only as a backdrop or stage on which urban economic and cultural activities take place. In contrast, there has been a recent groundswell of interest—originating in places as diverse as environmental activism, environmental history, landscape architecture, and environmental education—in reinterpreting the city as a space intimately connected with nature. This article examines the possibilities for integrating this rethinking of the relationship between city and nature into undergraduate education. Specifically, it outlines the rationale, objectives, and design of a course on urban ecology and examines the benefits and challenges of doing urban ecology as part of geographic education.