GEO/GRAPHIC DESIGN: THE LIMINAL SPACE OF THE PAGE

For many geographers, the printed page is no longer a productive tool to engage contemporary definitions of place or debates surrounding the nonrepresentational. There is a discernible shift within the discipline toward creative research methods, including using media such as film or sound, with a perception that they are less “fixed” in nature. In this article, however, I suggest that, by developing “geo/graphic” work that draws on theories and practices from both cultural geography and graphic design, the page can be recast as a liminal space, a threshold between readers and their understanding and imagination. I propose that a book has the potential to offer a multisensory, interactive space of exploration for readers and that the construction of such geo/graphic work also offers researchers an additional creative method with which to understand place.     

Forest Transitions,Environmental Social Theory,and Land Science Research: Reply to Walker

John C. Allen and Don A. Dillman. Against all Odds: Rural Community in the Information Age

Richard M. Auty. Patterns of Development: Resources, Policy, and Economic Growth

David Bell and Gill Valentine, eds. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities

Joseph K. Berry. Spatial Reasoning for Effective GIS

Matthew S. Carroll. Community and the Northwestern Logger

Kam Wing Chan. Cities with Invisible Walls: Reinterpreting Urbanization in Post-1949 China

Nora Federici, Karen Oppenheim Mason and Solvi Sogner, eds. Women's Position and Demographic Change

Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places

Costis Hadjimichalis and David Sadler, eds. Europ at the Margins: New Mosaics of Inequality

Sally Hardy, Mark Hart, Louis Albrechts and Anastasios Katos, eds. An Enlarged Europe: Regions in Competition

Chiao-Min Hsieh and Jean Kan Hsieh. China: A Provincial Atlas

Douglas L. Johnson and Laurence A. Lewis. Land Degradation: Creation and Desctruction

Mark Luccarelli. Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning

Bruce Mitchell, ed. Resource and Environmental Management in Canada: Addressing Conflict and Uncertainty

C. J. L. Murray and A. D. Lopez, eds. Global Comparitive Assessments in the Health Sector: Disease Burden, Expenditures and Information Packages

Martin O'Connor. ed. Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology

Harlan J. Onsrud and Gerald Rushton, eds. Sharing Geographic Information

Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley, eds. Writing the City: Eden, Babylon and the New Jerusalem

N. C. Saxena and Vishwa Ballabh. Farm Forestry in East Asia

Alvin Y. So and Stephen W. K. Chiu. East Asia and the World Economy

Will D. Swearingen and Abdellatif Bencherifa, eds. the North African Environment at Risk

Diane L. Wolf, ed. Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork

Charles I. Zinser. Outdoor Recreation: United States National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands     

A Review of “The Power of Place”

Two qualitative case studies, one focusing on K-12 teachers and the other on middle school students, explore key factors associated with using Geographic Information Systems in the classroom. In both studies, access to appropriate hardware is a critical barrier. Time is another critical barrier—time to learn the GIS software and time in the curriculum to incorporate GIS as a learning experience. In both case studies, learning the technology at the expense of learning spatial analysis was a danger, suggesting the need for conscious focus on the goal of using GIS to learn how to “do geography.”     

Travel From Home: An Economic Geography of Commuting Distances in Montreal

The question of how home and workplace are linked through commuting is at the heart of much recent work on metropolitan areas. However, the emphasis tends to be either on spatial-economic models or on the impact of empirically measured individual, household, neighborhood, and transport mode characteristics; relatively little work has focused on job characteristics and place of employment as they relate to travel to work. In this article, I investigate whether people travel different distances to access different types of job location, with particular attention to the different distances traveled by men and women. My points of reference are the major employment centers (poles) in the Montreal region. After controlling for a wide range of explanations that may account for different travel distances, I conclude that differences in commuting length between different places of work are, by and large, independent of possible explanatory factors such as residential location, economic sector, occupation, income, and participation in household earnings—some places of work generate longer commutes than others. Men and women behave differently in relation to these places: women will travel farther to access jobs in centers whereas men will not; and despite their shorter average overall commutes, women travel farther than men to reach jobs in the CBD. This suggests, at the metropolitan scale, that each job location may have its own local culture or "milieu," and that men and women react differently to them.     

Stability of Spatial Structure of Urban Agglomeration in China Based on Central Place Theory

This paper brings forward the concept of stability of the spatial structure of urban agglomeration(UA)based on Central Place Theory by introducing centrality index and fractal theory.Before assessment,K=4 is selected as parameter to calculate centrality index and fractal dimension(K represents the quantitive relationship between city and the counties in Central Place Theory),and then found the number of nodes,the type of spatial structure,the spatial al-location of nodes with different hierarchy affecting the stability of spatial structure.According to spatial contact direction and the level of stability,UAs in China are classified into five types.Finally,it is posed as a further question that how to use hierarchical relation K=6 and K=7 in central place system to coordinate with the assessment of stability of spatial structure is brought forward.     

WILBUR AND ME

ABSTRACT. Wilbur Zelinsky has spent his spectacular scholarly career enhancing our understanding of American life through explorations into the nation's cultural geography. Although he has illuminated grand themes, he is also celebrated for his eclectic work on the geography of Americana. Few, however, may appreciate his lifelong enjoyment of American literature. Early in my scholarly journey, Wilbur encouraged my awakening interest in reading widely, beyond the boundaries of professional literature. Conversations with him about shared literary enthusiasms affirmed my reading proclivities. From classic novels to those of minor authors, commentary by journalists, biographies, and mass‐market fiction, literature offers provocative insights into American life and landscape. Reading widely takes one in unforeseen professional directions and yields unexpected rewards. Wilbur's sheer delight with the phenomena of the American scene, however seemingly trivial, instructs us to not overlook their possible geographical significance.     

基于GIS的智慧地名解决方案

地名是一个地方的文化索引,是社会发展的基础地理信息和社会公共信息,在国防建设、社会管理、公众服务等方面都发挥着重要作用.因此,在城市发展进程中,需要不断提升地名的管理水平以及地名的公共服务能力.本文基于GIS建设地名公共服务平台,通过建设城市地名"一张图"整合区划地名相关的数据,进而支撑对地名全生命周期的管理,并面向社会提供标准全面的地名信息服务,充分发挥地名在政务管理、公众服务中的价值.     

Tinkering at the Limits: agricultural shows,small-scale producers and ecological connections

Agricultural shows in Australia are typically depicted as celebrations of colonisation and scientific and technical modernisation in food production. The historical focus of shows is on competition to maximise perceived quality and yield of goods, from wheat to cattle. Through these frameworks, shows are often understood as supporting industrial-scale agricultural practices that promote an ecologically-blind approach to food production. However, we suggest that competitions in contemporary agricultural shows play a role in contesting the limits of such anthropocentric thinking. We focus on a hitherto unexplored aspect of agricultural shows: small-scale growers who exhibit produce in their annual local show competitions. Through a case study drawing on interviews with exhibitors and judges, combined with participant observation at the 2012 Royal Canberra Show, we highlight the complex relationships between people, place and more-than-humans in this unique cultural site. In so doing, we suggest that exhibiting in the show can intensify urban and peri-urban small-scale producer engagement in practices of ‘tinkering’. This facilitates embodied encounters with the limits of both human mastery and those of the materiality of non-humans involved in food production. Through the ongoing, adaptive processes of tinkering encouraged by such competitions, we suggest that exhibiting in agricultural shows can support the growth of ecologically informed, place-based understandings of the food system and challenge binaries of the rural/city divide.     

“The mangrove preserves life”: Habitat of African survival in the Atlantic world

Mangroves emerged a crucial habitat for Africans and their descendants during the transatlantic slave trade. Europeans avoided mangroves because of the deadly fevers that frequently claimed the lives of those who ventured there. Many were felled by lethal falciparum malaria, against which Africans alone carried genetic resistance. The transatlantic slave trade spread the disease‐causing plasmodium to New World Anopheles mosquitoes through infected bloodstreams, extending African mangroves’ pestilential reputation to the Neotropics. On both sides of the Atlantic, an environment Europeans feared provided Africans food, basic necessities, and sometimes, refuge from slavery. In Neotropical mangroves Africans largely replaced declining Amerindian populations, who were also immunologically vulnerable to the introduced plasmodium. Today, African descendants in Old and New World mangroves demonstrate longstanding human use of this ecosystem. Comparison of shellfish gathering and gendered collection patterns in mangroves recognizes Amerindian and African influences in Neotropical mangroves and illuminates the connections to transatlantic diasporic history. The discussion considers how a more‐than‐human geography shaped “place‐based knowledge” of mangrove swamplands that remained marginal to European territorializing during the colonial period. African and Afro‐descendant place‐making underscores the ways people, plants, insects, microbes, shellfish, and tides framed geography and diasporic identity at the periphery of the Atlantic world.