SOCIAL RELATIONS SPATIALLY FIXED: CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE OF SCHOOL DISTRICTS IN SAN ANTONIO,TEXAS

ABSTRACT. More than 140 court cases filed in the United States between 1970 and 2003 argued that unacceptable and unconstitutional funding disparities exist among school districts in most states. In those arguments, stories, statistics, and maps are used to compare various school districts to prove that conditions are indeed unequal. Both sides—plaintiff and defendant—use such information to disprove each other's contentions. In so doing, each assumes that the political spaces of the school districts are absolute, timeless, and independent. Failure to recognize that these spaces—the school districts—are not objective but, in fact, constitutive of the class and race relations actually being argued and debated in court further legitimates local geographies of privilege and deprivation. I examine the formation of the school districts around San Antonio, Texas to illustrate that these districts are far from independent of one another and were formed to isolate privileged communities from the rest of the city. A relational view of space‐time allows such spaces as school districts to assume a political role, as opposed to the absolute, independent spaces they now represent.     

旅游业的发展对丽江古城社会文化的影响

旅游业的发展对旅游目的地的社会文化产生的影响是巨大的.丽江古城也遭受着同样的命运,这种影响集中表现在丽江古城功能的转变、社会网络的变迁和文化的涵化.这些影响都是由于旅游业的迅速发展引起的,而且还在加深.只有认识到以上的影响才能为下一步采取措施来控制这些影响提供前提保障.     

社区生活圈的新时间地理学研究框架

社区生活圈从居民日常活动及行为视角考察城市社区,是城市地理学和城市相关学科的研究前沿,也是中国国土空间规划体系创新的重要组成部分,以及中国城市社会可持续发展的重要抓手。伴随着流动性和信息化的不断深入,社区生活圈的主体日益多元化、社区活动和居民时空行为日益多样化、社区空间的功能与意义日益丰富化,亟需城市地理学的研究创新与实践引导。时间地理学是理解人与环境关系的社会—技术—生态综合方法,为早期基于时空行为与生活空间的社区生活圈研究提供了重要基础。新时间地理学重视家庭及其他组织企划的交互与时空组合,可为社区生活圈内个体—家庭—社区之间的复杂互动关系研究、时空行为的社会文化制约与多情境分析及模拟提供重要支撑。论文基于新时间地理学方法,从理论、方法和实证3个维度提出社区生活圈的新时间地理学研究框架,具体包括构建社区生活圈的时空行为理论,揭示社区生活圈的时空间结构;创新社区生活圈的时空行为分析和模拟方法;从社区生活圈时空行为优化、社区交往生活圈、社区安全生活圈等方面创新中国城市规划与管理等研究内容。     

粮食地理学视角下乡村本土农业的社会建构——元阳哈尼梯田稻作系统案例

选取元阳哈尼梯田稻作系统为研究对象,基于粮食地理学的农产品生产-消费网络理论,通过深度访谈等方法分析多元主体在本土农业生产消费领域中的策略及行为,解读其中的社会建构现象。研究发现:农业生产领域中多元参与特征显著,优质稻种的人为筛选、种养品种的多样化以及土地流转的推广均为政府、村民和外来企业为实现各自利益而共同协商达成的策略,不同行动者共同利用与改造着农业生产的各种要素;农产品消费领域中,政府和企业逐步承担了农产品商品化的后续工序,国有资本完成农产品的收购、加工与包装,外来商业资本负责建构商品品牌,满足目标消费者的市场需求是他们的共同目标。     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviewed in this article: Marine Resources of Kuwait: Their Role in the Development of Non-oil Resources . Fatimah H. Y. al -Abdul -Razzak Recollections of a Revolution: Geography as Spatial Science . Mark Billinge , Derek Gregory and Ron Martin Entre l'Eden et l'Utopie . Luc Bureau Developments in Political Geography . M. A. Busteed The Elements of Graphing Data . William S. Cleveland Rural Resource Management . Paul J. Cloke and Chris C. Park Third World Atlas . Ben Crow and Alan Thomas Exploitation, Conservation, Preservation: A Geographic Perspective on Natural Resource Use . Susan L. Cutter , Hilary Lambert Renwick, and William H. Renwick . Wine Regions of the Southern Hemisphere . Harm Jan de Blij Regional Development: Problems and Policies in Eastern and Western Europe . George Demko The Geographer at Work . Peter R. Gould Change in the Amazon Basin . John Hemming Geography Since the Second World War . R. J. Johnston and P. Claval Urbanization in China: Town and Countryside in a Developing Economy 1949–2000 A.D. , R. J. R. Kirkby Transport and Communications for Pacific Microstates: Issues in Organisation and Management . Christopher C. Kissling Fluvial Forms and Processes . David Knighton The Urban Millennium . Josef W. Konvitz Technological Transition in Cartography . Mark Stephen Monmonier Field Guide to Soils and the Environment: Applications of Soil Surveys . Gerald W. Olson Northern Australia: The Arenas of Life and Ecosystems on Half a Continent . Don Parkes A Killing Rain: The Global Threat of Acid Rain . Thomas Pawlick From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850–1931 . Donald J. Pisani Hybrid Maize Diffusion in Kenya . Franz -Michael Rundquist Warning and Response to the Mount St. Helens Eruption . Thomas F. Saarinen and James L. Sell Coastal Geomorphology in Australia . B. G. Thom Tropical Rain Forests of the Far East , 2nd ed . T. C. Whitmore The Dark Side of the Earth . Robert Muir Wood Categorical Data Analysis for Geographers and Environmental Scientists , Neil Wrigley     

Freshwater geographies: Experimenting with knowing and doing geography differently

The fair and effective governance of freshwater is an increasingly prominent issue in New Zealand. Emerging from a complex of cultural, economic and biophysical narratives, freshwater geographies are multiple, varied and increasingly acknowledged as worthy of interdisciplinary scrutiny. In this commentary, we reflect on a series of generative spaces that we – as group of postgraduate geographers (plus supporting staff) – created to engage with the multiplicity of freshwater meanings both within and beyond the academy. Through this evolving epistemic‐political project, we significantly reframed our own understandings about what freshwater ‘is’ and how it ought to be governed. By pursuing a deeper understanding of how the world gets made, we expand our ability to know and make it differently.     

Global divides: Deconstructing the way we see the world should not be left to senior geography

Terms such as ‘Third World/First World’, ‘Developing/Developed’ are still in common usage despite many commentators and educators signalling that they are inadequate. Using empirical evidence from research in New Zealand, this paper discusses how these dividing terms may be under stress among young people who seek new ways of learning about places and people. In conceptualising the South Pacific, terms like ‘developing world’ may be challenged by young people. Debating these terms at all levels of education is important and should not merely be left to tertiary levels.     

Gender,Place, and Social Contacts: Understanding Awareness of Vulnerability to Terrorism

Abstract

Creating resiliency, accomplished in part by individuals preparing for disaster, is the primary strategy outside of law enforcement for responding to the threat of urban terrorism. Individuals prepare when they perceive a need to do so, yet little is known about what shapes a person's awareness of vulnerability to terrorism. Because evidence indicates that social contacts act as conduits of information and affect perception of risk to natural hazards, it is possible that such contacts also affect terrorism vulnerability awareness. Because social contacts are also known to be systematically segmented by gender and location, we hypothesized that conversations about terrorism vary by gender and place, specifically the home and work place. Drawing on data from 93 interviews with householders in Boston, the study demonstrates that: (1) family networks generated discussions of home preparedness, whereas workplace networks engaged a wider variety of topics; (2) women discussed terrorism more frequently and in greater depth than did men; and (3) women heard more preparedness messages for the home than did men, whereas men undertook preparedness activities external to the home. The findings bridge geography and terrorism studies by theorizing emplaced and subjective human experiences that prompt conversations about terrorism. These conversations, in turn, help urban emergency managers and risk-hazards geographers promote rational dialogue and action vis-à-vis terrorism. Hazards researchers have shown that the more people discuss terrorism, the less they seek extreme and unwarranted responses.     

Dark side of the planet: hidden dimensions of urban agglomeration

ABSTRACT

This intervention probes the hidden, political dimensions of planetary urbanization. Drawing on political theory, it approaches its analysis through the analytic of ‘the political,’ the dimension in which antagonism performs a constitutive function in the social order. In doing so the intervention throws into relief the ways in which group-based differentiation, conflict, and exclusion establish the conditions of possibility for ongoing transformations of urban agglomeration. It then develops a case for further exploring intersections of the political and capitalist agglomeration to generate new knowledge about current mutations in urban economies of space.     

Exploring space–time paths in physical and social closeness spaces: a space–time GIS approach

Exploring the evolution of people’s social interactions along with their changing physical locations can help to achieve a better understanding of the processes that generate the relationships between physical distance and social interactions, which can benefit broad fields of study related to social networks. However, few studies have examined the evolving relationships between physical movements and social closeness evolution. This is partially related to the shortage of longitudinal data in both physical locations and social interactions and the lack of an exploratory analysis environment capable of effectively investigating such a process over space and time. With the increasing availability of sociospatiotemporal data in recent years, it is now feasible to examine the relationships between physical separation and social interactions at the individual level in a space–time context. This research was intended to offer a spatiotemporal exploratory analysis approach to address this challenge. The first step was to propose the concept of a social closeness space–time path, which is an extension of the space–time path concept in time geography, to represent evolving human relationships in a social closeness space. A space–time geographical information system (GIS) prototype was then designed to support the representation and analysis of space–time paths in both physical and social closeness spaces. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed concept and design in gaining insight into the impact of physical migration on online social closeness was demonstrated through an empirical study. The contributions of this study include an extension of the time–geographic framework from physical space to social closeness space, the development of a multirepresentation approach in a GIS to integrate an individual’s space–time paths in both physical and social closeness spaces, and an exploratory analysis of the evolving relationships between physical separation and social closeness over time.