Changing Course: Comparing Emerging Watershed Institutions in River Restoration Contexts

How watershed collaborations adapt to changing conditions is an enduring question in collaborative resource management. Our research examined the goals and structure of collaborations within watersheds subject to the same federal and state regulations, but at different restoration states. We employed semistructured interviews, document analysis, and participant observation to complete our qualitative research. Our results suggest that policy stakeholders’ understandings of ecological and social attributes influence watershed goals. Within the impaired system, collaborations invested in shifting public perception to engender support for longer term biophysical restoration. Within the restored watershed, collaborations achieved dramatic biophysical improvements but were challenged in addressing social benefits of restoration. Redefining restoration to incorporate social and ecological systems at the outset provides the opportunity to set benchmarks for measuring success that incorporate social and ecological factors, and to create institutions adept at responding to shifting restoration states.     

Do social meanings matter? How and how much social meanings influence everyday transport practices?

We live among a throng of social meanings. In a transport context, cars are described as symbols of status, bicycles as the toys of Middle Aged Men in Lycra, and buses as ‘loser cruisers’. This study asks ‘Do these social meanings matter?’ Do they influence people's transport practices, and if so, how and how much? The participants in this research reported that social meanings had widespread influences, particularly on their transport mode choices, vehicle choices, and travel performances. This research has implications for the ways that social meanings are incorporated into transport policy and future transport research.     

Geography of crime in a Brazilian context: an application of social disorganization theory

Geography of crime research dates back to the early 1800s, most of which in English and in the context of the United States and Europe, but with a growing and significant literature studying the developing world. We contribute to this literature through an application of social disorganization theory in a Latin American context: Campinas, Brazil. We consider a number of property and violent crime types using census tracts as the spatial unit of analysis. Implementing a spatial regression method, we find support for social disorganization theory, but not as strong as similar studies in Europe and North America. However, because of the context of Campinas, Brazil, a different understanding of the local conditions proves to be important for understanding the geography of crime in this context. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of theoretical developments as well as crime prevention initiatives.     

乡村旅游精准扶贫的创新路径——基于社会保障理论的思考

乡村旅游发展能够给当地居民带来巨大的就业机遇,社区参与能够提高乡村居民整体的社会保障水平,这为吉登斯所倡导的“第三条道路”社会保障思想提供了现实依据,也为乡村旅游实现精准扶贫效果提供了创新路径。洛阳栾川重渡沟村的社会保障在乡村旅游的影响下经历了3个阶段,1999年前未发展乡村旅游时受国家干预主义影响较大,1999—2004年乡村旅游发展体现了经济自由主义的影响,而2004年至今的实践体现了经济自由主义与国家干预主义的融合,实现了政府与市场、公平与效率、权利与责任的相对均衡,实践中已初步实现了以就业保障为基础、以养老保障及最低生活保障等为内容的乡村社会保障的全面提高。研究表明,西方背景下形成的国家干预主义及经济自由主义在中国乡村市场经济实践中有着不同的诠释及呈现方式,乡村旅游精准扶贫的关键是社区力量的觉醒及培育,其创新路径是实现“以旅游换保障”,即实现乡村旅游经济功能向社会功能的转变。     

Coupling mobile phone and social media data: a new approach to understanding urban functions and diurnal patterns

Understanding urban functions and their relationships with human activities has great implications for smart and sustainable urban development. In this study, we present a novel approach to uncovering urban functions by aggregating human activities inferred from mobile phone positioning and social media data. First, the homes and workplaces (of travelers) are estimated from mobile phone positioning data to annotate the activities conducted at these locations. The remaining activities (such as shopping, schooling, transportation, recreation and entertainment) are labeled using a hidden Markov model with social knowledge learned from social media check-in data over a lengthy period. By aggregating identified human activities, hourly urban functions are inferred, and the diurnal dynamics of those functions are revealed. An empirical analysis was conducted for the case of Shenzhen, China. The results indicate that the proposed approach can capture citywide dynamics of both human activities and urban functions. It also suggests that although many urban areas have been officially labeled with a single land-use type, they may provide different functions over time depending on the types and range of human activities. The study demonstrates that combining different data on human activities could yield an improved understanding of urban functions, which would benefit short-term urban decision-making and long-term urban policy making.     

西方劳工地理学研究进展及对中国的启示

与新古典工业区位论和新马克思主义经济地理学论将工人视为一种生产要素和抽象劳动力不同,劳工地理学将工人视为具有能动性的社会主体,研究工人如何按照自身的意愿创造有助于自身生存和再生产的空间。这种劳工认识论的转变在国际经济地理学界产生了极大和持续的反响,促使劳工地理学发展成为具有独特概念体系的经济地理子学科。本文梳理了近20年西方劳工地理学的研究进展,围绕工人能动性的概念、表现形式、形成机制以及它与空间、尺度、地方、全球生产网络之间的关系展开分析。最后基于劳工地理学前沿问题的分析,认为中国劳工地理研究应重点关注中国特色工会体制下工人能动性的构成、经济地理影响与形成的地域条件,并探索有助于社会升级的制度安排。开展劳工地理研究有助于拓展经济地理学的劳动力研究范畴,对认识中国市场经济深入发展时期面临的劳资矛盾和探索共享发展政策具有重要的现实意义。     

基于可达性测度的公园绿地服务公平性时空分析

由于城区土地资源的稀缺性,公园绿地的供给与人口对绿地的需求往往难以匹配,出现了公园绿地空间分布不均衡和服务不公平性的现象。本文以两步移动搜索法的可达性测度为基础,开展武汉市主城区公园绿地社会公平性的时空分析研究。研究表明:新一轮规划实施后,从服务的整体效益来看,武汉市主城区公园绿地资源分配向着更趋于公平的方向发展;从公园绿地服务的空间格局来看,绿地可达性提高较为显著,可达性极低区域面积减少。     

SuperMap三维专题信息展示系统的设计与实现

专题地图主要由地理基础和专题内容组成,地理基础作为编制专题内容的骨架,表示专题内容的地理位置及与地理环境的关系。传统的专题信息主要以二维专题地图的形式展现,依靠GIS的制图表达和空间分析能力来展示与专题内容相关的信息。基于三维空间的专题信息展示,除了集成影像、地形、矢量、模型等基础地理数据,还可以借助地理空间位置丰富专题业务数据,表达社会化多媒体信息。同时借助三维空间展示效果,以时间轴的形式反映空间范围内的信息动态变化。本文探讨了借助三维GIS,融合地理基础信息及社会媒体信息,形成多维尺度的信息展现方式,有序直观的反映整个专题的内容,丰富专题信息的表达效果。     

Advancing Digital Earth: beyond the next generation

The Digital Earth (DE) movement is gaining momentum. Much of it is unstructured. This paper examines a number of recent developments including those in health sensors (Wearable Absence, Q-Sensor, and Guardian Angels) and systems frameworks (Gelernter's Mirror Worlds, Virtual Australia, and New Zealand). Consideration is given to the implications of DE for citizens and on citizen science, including those of ethics. A suite of principles to guide the development of DE is proposed.     

The Social Geography of Childhood Mortality,Toronto, 1901

Urban geographers and historians have long recognized the relationship between cities and poor health, though few have documented this relationship for cities in the past. While trends, and national or regional variations, of mortality rates are well documented for Britain and Europe, the picture is less complete for North America. Through the use of household data aggregated to the neighborhood scale, this paper explores the spatial variation of childhood mortality (deaths under the age of five) in relation to the social geography of Toronto, Canada, in 1901. Examination of individual records illustrate that the traditional dichotomous relationship between suburban and inner-city areas, in terms of health status (mortality), did not exist in turn of the 20th century Toronto. Rather, inner-city slums and suburban fringe areas were found to be equally likely to have high levels of childhood mortality. Furthermore, the neighborhood spatial patterns of childhood mortality were more affected by the residential segregation of religious groups (e.g., Catholics and Jews) than the distribution of households by social class or the housing conditions in which the people lived.