Review symposium: our common future: the world commission on environment and development

In 1983 the General Assembly of the United Nations called for the setting up of a World Commission on Environment and Development. The Commission's ambitious tasks were described by its Chairman, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, as: (1) to propose long‐term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable developments by the year 2000 and beyond; (2) to recommend ways concern for the environment could be translated into greater cooperation among developing countries and between countries at different stages of economic and social development; (3) to consider ways and means by which the international community could deal more effectively with environmental concerns; and (4) to help define shared perceptions of long‐term environmental issues and the appropriate efforts needed to deal successfully with problems of protecting and enhancing the environment. The Commission's Report, Our common future,was published in 1987.     

重建地方：人文地理与GIS结合研究的路径

地方是很重要的地理学概念。中外学界对地方的研究有丰富积累。围绕地方的理论与现实问题,探索人文地理与GIS结合研究的路径和方法对中国地理学尤为重要。“重建地方”旨在打破学科界限,重新发现学术研究的“地方”,并将学术与生活、思想与技术紧密结合起来,反思和重建生活中的“地方”。人文地理与GIS结合研究主要聚焦于流动性的大尺度城市空间与稳定性的小尺度社区空间。通过运用开放的街景地图、3D-VQGIS等新GIS工具和方法,整合大数据与小数据,将定量与定性结合,丰富了地方性研究的方法与理论,使人文地理与GIS结合有新的方法论与可操作的手段。以地方为主题,人文地理与GIS的结合还将重塑这2个子学科,进而促进地理学发展。未来应该大力探索人文地理与GIS结合的思想、理论与方法,实现学科内的交融互动,并将其应用于解释尺度交错的现实问题,进而在理论和实践上重建地方。     

Memory in place

Geographers and psychologists both seek to understand people's behaviour and their cognitive and emotional lives so it is somewhat surprising that there has not been more theoretical cross‐fertilisation of the two disciplines. ‘On time, place and happiness’ is a rare but welcome exception, showing how research in social‐cognitive psychology might usefully clarify thinking about temporality, place and well‐being. This commentary examines several additional human memory phenomena that geographers might like to consider in their theorising about these matters.     

宁波老外滩酒吧街的不得其所与地方建构

酒吧作为城市休闲空间的代表,近年来迅速地在中国城市中扩散。欧美世界的酒吧与地方秩序、社会问题联系紧密,第三世界的酒吧经常被西方学者作为西方的文化飞地,地方权力集中的代表。运用克里斯威尔的“不得其所”为概念框架,以中国沿海城市宁波的一条酒吧街老外滩为案例地,通过问卷调查与访谈观察中外消费者的不同消费行为及空间选择,探讨中国酒吧街的权力结构,试图找出一条不同于西方语境的地方权力建构路径。所得结论如下：① 宁波老外滩酒吧街的“不得其所”现象表现为：中外消费者在选择酒吧上是空间分离的,而且在中国消费者存在的酒吧并不欢迎外国消费者,这一现象建构了酒吧街的地方性;② 参与老外滩地方性建构的主要力量是中外消费者,其中中国消费者在建构地方性中占据主导地位,他们不仅不再将酒吧街作为外国人消费的场所,也排斥不属于自己群体的其他人;③ 与西方研究多认为第三世界酒吧是西方的“文化飞地”,消费者通常是西方人或接受过西方教育的本地精英,其他本地人被隔绝在外不同,宁波老外滩的酒吧呈现出一种中国消费者“反隔离”西方消费者的现象。     

Conceptualising the geographic world: the dimensions of negotiation in crowdsourced cartography

In crowdsourced cartographic projects, mappers coordinate their efforts through online tools to produce digital geospatial artefacts, such as maps and gazetteers, which were once the exclusive territory of professional surveyors and cartographers. In order to produce meaningful and coherent data, contributors need to negotiate a shared conceptualisation that defines the domain concepts, such as road, building, train station, forest and lake, enabling the communication of geographic knowledge. Considering the OpenStreetMap Wiki website as a case study, this article investigates the nature of this negotiation, driven by a small group of mappers in a context of high contribution inequality. Despite the apparent consensus on the conceptualisation, the negotiation keeps unfolding in a tension between alternative representations, which are often incommensurable, i.e., hard to integrate and reconcile. In this study, we identify six complementary dimensions of incommensurability that recur in the negotiation: (1) ontology, (2) cartography, (3) culture and language, (4) lexical definitions, (5) granularity, and (6) semantic overload and duplication.     

Putting Understanding the Changing Planet in Context: A Response

Understanding the Changing Planet was commissioned by the National Research Council to assess, for an audience of policymakers and funding agencies, key ways in which the “geographical sciences” can help address pressing issues facing society. In keeping with the charge, the report shows how particular empirically focused research initiatives in the geographical sciences can advance understanding of a set of selected major societal issues. Although constrained by a charge focused on the geographical sciences, the committee took an ecumenical approach to science, highlighted many mixed-methods studies, and framed questions that cut across traditional subdisciplinary divisions. It is important to take the report on its own terms and not to view it either as an assessment of the entire discipline of geography or to see it as an effort to encourage geographers to adopt a particular methodological or theoretical stance. Instead, the report should be seen as a study demonstrating, for a broad audience, the types of contributions the geographical sciences can make to addressing major issues of the day.     

Reflections on the place of Larkin

Summary The close association of the poet Larkin with the city of Hull has induced references to Larkinland, though commercial exploitation of this concept is very limited. This paper examines Larkin's sense of place and explores his relationship with Hull and its environs. In drawing on his own personal landscapes, Larkin intermittently involves the reader in the pleasure of recognition. For the inhabitant of Hull, some poems have added value. 'Here' paints an evocative picture of Hull in the 1950s, but also links to the interpretation of Larkin as the poet of provincial England. However, Larkinland, either as Hull or as provincial mid-century England, has a slender basis.     

Creative industries in the tropics: Reflections on creativity and northeastern Australia as place

This paper explores the concept of creativity and place as relevant to Cairns and Townsville in northeastern Australia. These two provincial cities are key to the economic and population growth of northern Australia and as such are the focus of renewed interest from all levels of government. While the creative industries sector in each location is significant, to date there has been no research specifically exploring the views of industry participants in terms of the creative strengths, impediments and opportunities across the region. Interviews with 38 creative industries participants were completed, revealing the significant benefits and challenges associated with being located in a remote tropical environment where the concept of place is strong. The interviews also reveal a number of potential growth strategies for the sector in each location that have the potential to inform policy and urban development approaches not only in the tropical north of Australia but also more broadly across the country. That is, the findings provide further evidence in support of the need for ongoing research into the particular contributions of regional and rural cities to the global creative economy.     

Rural mobility in Java: the village economy and the rest of the world

The effect of internal migration on rural populations in Central Java, Indonesia, is analyzed. The focus is on the relationship between the village and the outside world and how it affects the type and patterns of migration that occur. The data were collected in May 1985 in interviews with persons leaving or entering one village.     

科技型创新区人本化构建的国际实践及启示

创新和创新区已日益成为城市经济发展和城市竞争力的重要元素,在科技和人才日渐成为激发城市创新型经济,及促进城市活力的主导甚至决定性因素的当今时代,尤为如此。通过对欧洲、北美和亚洲三个不同类型的科技型创新区国际最佳实践的系统梳理,甄别出用以打造一个科技型创新区的共通性要素、标准和原则。国际最佳实践证明,科技型创新区的人本化构建正在成为一种主流趋势,即综合考虑人在各阶段、各层次等多样化需求的基础上,通过对文化要素的有效鉴别和这些要素之间的作用机理,使它们有机融合并系统嵌入到创新区的空间打造中。结论表明：要成功打造一个科技型创新区,必须考虑并重视七大要素,即创意人才、企业集群、能动设施、资金保障、运营管理、空间结构和文化氛围。基于此,提出对中国科技型创新区建设与发展的五大启示,即愿景导向下的持续培育、前瞻性定位、人本化空间布局、创新激发型活动安排和多利益群体参与。最后,还提出要从四个方面进行互动关联研究,以构建空间/地方人本化打造的完整理论体系。     

Putting discourse in its place: planning, sustainability and the urban capacity study

This article argues that policy discourses need to be set within the heterogeneous resources that governments routinely use to govern across the state/non-state divide. It employs the governmentality perspective to show how a discursive coalition in the planning for housing sector uses such resources to embed a new rationality of 'planning for sustainability' in a host of differing local arenas. The article extends the governmentality approach by proposing that this 'embedding' process is geographically uneven as the discourse becomes enmeshed in differing economic and environmental circumstances. The analysis thus reveals a geography of governmentality by showing how local actions intrude upon the functioning of governmental networks.     

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 place of individuals in the politics of scale

Conceptualizations and re-conceptualizations of scale have been powerful tools for explaining spatial processes that transcend traditionally-bounded territories. Examining the role of individuals within a politics of scale can do even more to explain multi-scalar conflicts. This paper does so by examining struggles over airport expansion in the US, showing how an understanding of the various roles of individuals in the politics of scale – as sites of multiple scales, as actors constituting other scales, and as scales in and of themselves – better explains multi-scalar conflicts and offers more opportunities for resolving them.     

Traces of the New Zealand psychiatric hospital: Unpacking the place of stigma

We survey the status of former public psychiatric hospitals, asking what has happened to the land and buildings. Drawing on Anderson's notion of traces, we argue for the transcendent role of stigma in closure processes and in subsequent reuse. We examine the extent to which evidence of mental health care remains at former hospital sites and developed a fivefold classification of end uses – retained health care; trans‐institutionalisation (to new institutional uses); residential; commercial; and dereliction. We conclude that while stigma is pervasive in shaping traces of the psychiatric hospital, its effects are filtered by locality‐specific factors including commercial potential.     

Understanding and managing climate change: the UK experience

Climate change has emerged over the last 25 years not just as a physical reality, affecting global and regional climates, but also as a socio-cultural phenomenon – an icon of a globalizing world which is increasingly altering the physical fabric of our planet and at the same time demanding new forms of global governance. The UK, both through its scientific research activity and through its development of climate change policy initiatives, has been at the forefront of this emergence. This review traces some of this history from a UK perspective, with an emphasis on the last 10 years. The relationship between climate change science and policy has become increasingly reflexive, leading to new forms of research and institutional structures. The academic discipline of geography has been rather marginalized from this process.     

Understanding pastoral mobility: the case of Senegalese Fulani

Based on a case study from Sahelian Senegal, this paper analyses how various actors perceive the importance of pastoral mobility and presents issues of importance for understanding the use of mobility among Fulani of Ferlo. One knowledge system is a scientific one, the 'new rangeland paradigm'. According to this, pastoral mobility is a means to balance variability in dryland resources; hence, 'nature' is the point of departure. Another knowledge system is local pastoral knowledge. For the pastoralists, the well-being of their animals is the point of departure and mobility is used to ensure that the livestock are in good condition. The paper shows that it is important to distinguish between mobility of pastoralists and of their herd; even though the pastoralists of northern Senegal have become semi-sedentary, their herds are still quite mobile. The pastoralists are willing to move around within a small territory, which they consider their place, but are unwilling to employ large-scale mobility themselves. Mobility is not of importance for their ethnic identity and some use paid herders to care for their livestock. By looking at both knowledge systems, we achieve a better understanding of pastoral mobility and how this may change in the future.